


Hair of the Dog That Bit You

by gutsforgarters



Series: But Now I've Got All That I Need [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Cunnilingus, Emetophobia, Episode: s04e12 Still, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Older Man/Younger Woman, Season/Series 04, Sexual Tension, Unsafe Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-11-12 12:49:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18011219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gutsforgarters/pseuds/gutsforgarters
Summary: “Can’t move,” Beth slurs. “Y’got your crossbow?”“Yeah.” The “Fuckin’ duh” is unspoken by implied. “Why?”“Was gonna ask you t’shoot me in the eye an’ put me outta my misery.”“Don’t be such a pussy, Greene."





	1. fuck me gently with a chainsaw

**Author's Note:**

> JUST SO YOU ARE ALL AWARE: I already regret this mightily.

So, about the moonshine: turns out it _didn’t_ strike Beth blind, only now she kind of wishes it _had_.

Her eyelids feel like they’ve been plastered shut with about five coatings of heavy-duty Gorilla Glue, and you know what? If she had the natural-born sense God gave one of Daryl’s poor dead squirrels, she’d take that as a sign to _not_ pry them open, but no. No, evidently she _doesn’t_ have that much sense, as illustrated by every single consciously made decision that led her to this moment, because then she grunts, stirs, and blinks herself awake.

That’s her first mistake.

“Jesus Christ _Almighty_ ,” Beth hisses, and she doesn’t make a habit out of taking the Lord’s name in vain, even when she’s got good reason to, but this isn’t blasphemy. This is her _pleading_ with a higher power to rescue her from perdition, because surely that’s hellfire cutting into her retinas and setting her head ablaze.

Beth makes her second mistake when she screws her eyes shut and rolls over onto her belly with a squeal of rusty mattress springs. Shutting her eyes, that’s fine, that’s sweet relief, but _moving_? Turns out her stomach’s not on board with that, because now it’s rolling and pitching like a boat on a storm-tossed sea, and, _Lord_ , she hasn’t felt this violently _ill_ since the first time she got walker guts all down her front. She feels as if she swallowed a pound of rancid meat and chased it with a bottle of cooking grease. If she had a gun and functioning fine motor skills, she’d shoot herself in the damn _head_.

But then, over the ringing in her ears, she hears a mighty _snore_.

Oh.

Oh, right.

Maybe today won’t end bloody, after all.

Beth purses her lips and grits her teeth—the better to cage in her rising gorge—and with a great deal of effort, she whispers, “ _Daryl_.”

There’s a too-long beat, and Beth’s working up the nerve to try again when a vague grunt drifts over to Beth from somewhere on her right. At least, she _thinks_ it’s her on right. She’s kind of lost all sense of direction, and also, her eyes may be shut, but she can still feel the room spinning on its axis. That doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that _Daryl isn’t getting up_.

It aches something awful, but Beth manages to slide her leg forward a couple of inches and nudge her toes against what she thinks must be Daryl’s knee, if the rasp of frayed denim molded over knobbled bone is anything to go by. 

“ _Daryl_.” Beth sounds like she ate rusty nails for breakfast, and she’s not sure if she’s even speaking English. “Daryl, _get up_.”

Another beat, possibly longer than the first, although, again, Beth can’t be sure, because she’s lost all sense of linear time as well as direction. What she does know is that Daryl’s usually a faster riser than this—he has to be, because his life hinges on it—so either he’s screwing with her, or he’s in just as sorry a state as she is. Beth can’t decide which possibility is worse.

But then the mattress springs squeal like nails on a chalkboard—Beth nestles deeper into her flat, musty pillow with a quiet whimper—and Daryl rasps, “Whassa matter?”

Beth dares to crack one eye open. She must be facing away from the window now, because while the light’s still neon bright, it no longer makes her want to scream and gouge her eyes out of their sockets. Beth blinks, and the blurred lump lying beside her shifts and focuses into a vaguely Daryl-shaped burrito wrapped up in a brown comforter. He’s got the blankets drawn up around his nose, but Beth can see enough of his face to pick out the squinty blue eyes that’re glaring muzzily at her through a shaggy set of bangs.

It occurs to Beth that her toes are still resting on Daryl’s knee, and if she could move without hurting, she’d withdraw them from his personal space. As it is, she can’t be bothered, and she just _barely_ has it in her to say, “I don’t feel so good.”

The squinty blue eyes blink, once, and then the brown blanket gets tugged down to reveal a mouth caught midway through a yawn. Daryl scrubs at his jaw, beard rasping against his palm, and grumbles, “Baby’s first hangover, huh?”

Beth would like to tell him to go to hell, but as he’s her only source of succor, she has no choice but to play nice.

(Well. Not her _only_ source of succor, if she wants to get technical about it. There’s always suicide, which is frankly looking more attractive by the minute, but she can’t _move_ on her own, and Daryl’s not nice enough to do her a favor and put her out of her misery.)

So she squeezes her eye shut—that helps a little—and whispers, “ _Please_ get me to somethin’ that passes for a toilet before I throw up on us both.”

“Think I ain't had worse?” Daryl asks, but the mattress jiggles—Beth whimpers again, curling up like a dead bug on her side and clutching her roiling stomach—and his feet hit the ground with a muffled thud. Huh. The floor in here must be carpeted. That probably isn’t important.

She hears Daryl circle to her side of the bed, and then his voice comes from directly above her like the voice of a thoroughly unimpressed God. “A’right, you damn lush. Up and at ’em.”

“Can’ move,” Beth slurs, consonants dripping like melted candy off her tongue, vowels blurring like smudged ink. “Y’got your crossbow nearby?”

“Yeah.” The “Fuckin’ duh” is unspoken by implied. “Why?”

“Was gonna ask you t’shoot me in the eye an’ put me outta my misery.”

“Don’t be such a pussy, Greene,” Daryl says, and then the warm, toasty comforter is ripped away from her without ceremony. Beth shivers and curls up into an even tighter ball, thighs rammed up against her stomach and palms pressed to her face, but Daryl’s got his hands tucked around her middle, and she knows it’s only gonna get worse from here. “C’mon, girl. Toilet’s right across the hall. S’only a couple'a steps.”

What feels like a couple of steps to him will surely feel like a thousand miles to her, but Beth uncurls from her cramped fetal position and allows Daryl to pull her upright and into the heat of his side. He wraps one of her noodly arms around his shoulders and tucks _his_ arm around her waist, tugging her up and lifting her feet at least half an inch off the floor. Probably for the best. If Beth were left to her own devices right now, she’d faceplant into the ugly shag carpeting.  

Beth’s head flops limply against Daryl’s shoulder as they—well, _he_ , since he’s doing most of the work, here—shuffle around the bed. “Wha’ ‘bout you?” she asks. She’s almost certainly drooling on him, but, hey, he _said_ he’s had worse.

“What about me?” Daryl asks, blunt fingers digging into Beth’s flank as he adjusts her weight. Beth’s diaphragm heaves, and she’s not sure if it’s from the tickle or an aborted surge of vomit. _Ulp_.

“What about your hangover? It doesn’t seem as bad as mine.”

“Don’t get hangovers no more.”

 _That_ compels Beth to open her eyes, for all that doing so is a spectacularly bad idea in a freaking _conga line_ of bad ideas. She squints at him through the searing morning light that’s streaming through the bare window and says, “Wait, for real?”

Daryl turns his head to look at her, oily bangs grazing her forehead. His eyes are bloodshot and rimmed with heavy black circles, but that’s standard. He really _doesn’t_ look any worse than usual. What the hell?

“I get ’em sometimes.” The breath that fans across her face when he talks is sour, but hers is probably just as bad, if the taste fuzzing the inside of her mouth is any indication. “Takes more’n a couple jars’a shitty moonshine to do me in, though, I’ll tell you that. You’re a real fuckin’ lightweight, Greene.”

“Yeah, well, I _am_ skinnier’n you,” Beth says, finding that the longer she keeps her eyes open, the less the light hurts. Maybe it’s all about building up a tolerance for it, although she wouldn’t say no to a nice pair of shades right about now. “And go easy on me, why don’t’cha? This _is_ my first time.”

It occurs to her that that last sentence could be interpreted in any number of unfortunate ways, and that these interpretations would only be exacerbated by the fact that they _woke up in the same bed_ after a night of heavy drinking and other questionable decisions, but Daryl, thank the good Lord, doesn’t even blink, and the blush that’s seared Beth’s cheeks cools faster than it came.  

“An’ your _last_ , if I got anythin’ to say about it.” Daryl looks front again, the tip of his nose brushing Beth’s cheek as he turns his face away from hers. They’re halfway around the foot of the bed, and while this room’s small enough that that bed takes up a premium of floorspace, the door and its promise of a toilet to throw up into have never felt farther away. “Spent most of my life holdin’ Merle’s head outta toilets, an’ I ain’t about to waste what’s left of it doin’ more’a the same for _your_ skinny lil’ ass.”

“Leave my ass out of it,” Beth says, petulant, still jittery from her unintentional innuendo. She’s got her eyes on her feet where they graze the carpet, not wanting to get them tangled and send them both bowling over, but she thinks she feels Daryl’s breath puff across her cheek, a hard exhale like one of his rare laughs. She looks up for a second, not at Daryl, but at the room around them. “Where’re we, anyway?”

The room’s small, like she said, and aside from the bed, there isn’t much to it. Plywood dresser shoved up against the wall by the door, some junk in the far corner, Daryl’s crossbow propped against his side of the bed. Walls painted a color that one might diplomatically describe as ‘puce’ are bare save for an analogue clock that doesn’t seem to be working. Beth guesses that she’s slept in worse places: compared to those storage lockers they stayed in during that winter on the run, this is a damn Hilton.

“Some double wide,” Daryl says, and they’re nearly at the door, just another couple steps. They’ve got this. _She’s_ got this. “What, you don’t remember?”

Beth digs in with her toes and drags them to a halt, not because she’s not in a hurry anymore, but because she can’t walk and think at the same time, not when she feels like someone took a hacksaw to her frontal lobe. He’s asking her if she doesn’t remember coming across this trailer—that’s what he’s saying on the surface, but his voice is thick with subtext, and Beth figures that he’s actually asking her what _else_ she might or mightn’t remember.

And she does remember. The gap between burning down the shack and finding shelter in this trailer is still kinda hazy, but everything that came before it—that, she remembers clear as Waterford crystal.

Beth bumps her hip against Daryl’s to indicate that she’s ready to get moving again.

“Nah,” she says. “I remember everythin’.” Daryl doesn’t reply, and she looks at him sidelong, mouth curling up into a smile that only twinges a little. “Don’t you worry none, Mr. Dixon. All your sordid secrets’re safe with me.” Safe as it gets, too, because who else is she gonna tell? It’s just them.

Them and this trailer and this _freaking_ hangover.

“Sure,” Daryl snorts. They’re in the yardstick hallway now, and Beth can see the white rim of a toilet bowl through the open door across the way. “An’ I won’t turn your ass in for first degree arson.”

“Uh-uh. You’re implicated, too.” Beth hip checks him again, harder this time, although he probably barely feels it. “You were an accomplice. You were—you were an _accessory_ —”

And either she’s been talking too much, or the movement of her hips sent of a kind of chain reaction through her body, because Beth’s words get choked off as her stomach heaves and her throat fills with an acidic surge that pours out of her mouth and all down her front.

“Well, shit,” says Daryl.

Beth blinks at the chunky brown soup clinging to her shirt and thighs and wonders if the mud snake Daryl fed her yesterday is somewhere in there.

“You good?” Daryl asks her, apparently unbothered by the sour smell drifting off of Beth and surely plugging up his nose, but, well. Like he said: he’s had worse. So has she, come to think of it.

“Uh,” Beth tries, then clamps her teeth shut and shakes her head once, slowly. No. No, she’s _not_ good. She can feel more vomit blocking up her throat, burning and sour, and she chokes out, “Daryl—m’gonna—”

“C’mon, then. I got you, c’mon.” Daryl lifts her feet off the floor again, half carrying her the distance to the bathroom, where he sets her down on her knees and folds her torso over the toilet bowl. Someone was considerate enough to leave the lid open. That’s nice. There’s a black oval of grime level with the waterline, which isn’t so nice.

Beth takes one whiff of the smell coming out of that bowl, shudders, and hurls.

She doesn’t want to touch this toilet, she _doesn’t_ , but she’s gotta hold onto something, so she does, snot and tears rising along with the puke. Her belly shouldn’t have much in it, but the vomit keeps coming anyway, squeezing itself out of her shuddering stomach in awful little rounds like bullets fired from a gun, and strings of bile are hanging off her lips, and it _won’t stop_.

She’s aware, distantly, of Daryl holding her hair with one hand and rubbing her back with the other. That’s very considerate of him. Beth should probably be embarrassed that he’s seeing her like this, but honestly, he’s seen her in sorrier states, and if it doesn’t bother him, it shouldn’t bother her.

He’s talking to her, too, so quietly that Beth thinks she might be imagining it. Real or imagined, it’s kind of nice.

“There y’go,” he’s saying, pressing his thick fingers against the knobs in her spine. “Jus’ let it out. You’re fine. I got you, girl, I got you.”

Eventually, it trickles off, and Beth presses her forehead to the cool porcelain seat for a second before deciding that she probably doesn’t want that thing touching her face and rearing back on her heels. Daryl scoots away from her, hands falling off of her to twitch in his lap, and Beth wipes the back of her wrist across her mouth as she looks at him.

Daryl leans forward to flush the toilet—it works—and his shoulder brushes hers for maybe half a second. He’s warm. His hands were warm, too.

“So,” Beth rasps. “That sucked.”

Daryl shrugs, picking absently at his cuticles. “Gonna suck for a while. Good news is, there prob’ly ain’t much left in your stomach to puke up.”

“ _That’s_ the good news?” Beth asks, skeptical, and Daryl flashes her one of his there-and-gone smiles.

Beth stares at him for a second before mumbling, “Figures,” and when Daryl looks a question at her, she clarifies, “Gettin’ you to crack a smile’s like pulling teeth. It just figures that the only way I can get you to do it is by pukin' my damn brains out.”

Daryl frowns at her. “S’not like I enjoy watchin’ you puke or nothin’. It fuckin’ reeks, and I ain’t no sadist, neither.”

Beth eases onto her butt and pretzels her legs. Moving hurts but resting all her weight on her heels will hurt worse in the long run. Her feet knock against Daryl’s as she shifts, and he doesn’t retreat from the contact, an occurrence that’s about as rare as his smile. Guess arson really does bring folks together.

What was she saying? Oh, right.

“Then what’s so funny?” she asks, and Daryl shrugs again.

“Spent all day yesterday with a wild hair up your ass about gettin’ your hands on some booze. Didn’t even think on the morning after, didja?”

Beth twists her mouth to one side, thoughtful. “No, I did.” When Daryl gives her a _look_ , she says, a little heatedly, “I _did_. I just didn’t care. Life’s short, you know?” Especially now. “Although I’ll admit that I wasn’t expectin’ it to feel _this_ bad.” As if in agreement, her headache spikes, and she presses a clammy palm against her forehead with a moan that wouldn’t sound alien coming out of the mouth of a walker.

“Head hurts?” Daryl says, although it’s not really a question. More like he’s just confirming what he already knew, but Beth nods anyway. Except nodding makes the bones in her jaw grind painfully together like somebody shattered them with a mallet, so she stops that right away. “Alright. Hold up a sec.”

Beth’s got her eyes screwed shut and covered with her hand, but she hears Daryl shift and push to his feet. His boots thud across the chilly tile, and then Beth’s alone, although she can distantly hear the rattle of ceramics and the clink of glass. Then the boots return, and Beth drops her hand and peels her eyes open.

A foggy glass has appeared on the edge of the sink, and Daryl’s rattling through the medicine cabinet mounted above it. He pulls out a white plastic bottle and gives it a testing rattle, squinting at the label.

“Extra-strength Tylenol,” he says, showing it to her. “Four months expired, though. Y’wanna try it anyway?”

“Won’t hurt,” Beth says, although it actually might hurt to put anything in her sloshing stomach, even if it’s just water and some pills. “Help me up.” Daryl grabs her outstretched wrist and levers her to her feet, making her head spin. She braces both hands on the sink. Swallows. Looks at Daryl through the stringy strands of hair that’ve flopped out of her wilting ponytail.

He’s looking back at her intently, but he’s _always_ looking at her intently, because that’s just how he is. Beth knows the weight of Daryl’s attention intimately now, has often felt it like a heavy palm on the nape of her neck. Usually it makes her itch like she’s just rolled around buck naked in poison oak, but right now, she’s got other concerns, like how she’s gonna go about her day fending off walkers when she can barely even _see_ through the pain of her headache.

“Y’alright?” he asks, sounding like he already knows the answer, but also like he just might humor her attempt at a brave face.

“I’ve had worse,” Beth says, echoing him, and he twitches his head on his neck, not quite a nod, before twisting the faucet on. The water runs clear as it splashes into the grimy glass, and he hands her that along with twice the recommended amount of Tylenol like sheer numbers will make up for the four-month-old expiration date.

“This ain’t the only trailer in the area.” Daryl crosses his arms and leans himself against the whitewashed wall as Beth downs the pills and chases them with water before filling the glass again to rinse out her rancid mouth. “We’ll check out the rest of ’em later, see if they got anythin’ in their cabinets that’s stronger’n fuckin’ expired Tylenol.”

Beth swishes the water around in her mouth. Leans over the sink and spits it out. “Think I’ll need a new shirt, too.” It’s stuck to her skin, wet and nasty, and even if she washes it, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to get rid of the sour smell clinging to its fibers without soap. There’s soap in a dish on the sink, but it’s a thin, calcified husk. “And pants.”

“Yeah,” Daryl says, uncrossing his arms. “Best we get cleaned up. ’Specially you. You smell like a damn bar floor.”

“You would know,” Beth mutters, and Daryl lazily flips her off.


	2. it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No dignity during the zombie apocalypse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Hit it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvKs2VLmVnY).

There’s a narrow shower stall catty corner to the toilet, but somebody must’ve come through and gutted the thing, either for parts or for the sheer release of senseless destruction, because it’s missing its valve and showerhead both. Which means that Beth and Daryl will have to make do with the sink.

Yeah. Beth _and_ Daryl. At the same time. _Together_.

It’s fine. It’s _fine_.

Daryl roots around in the linen closet and unearths a couple of crusty, threadbare washcloths that might’ve been white, once, five odd years or so ago. They look a little less crusty and a little whiter after Beth runs them under the faucet, and the thin husk of soap softens up a bit too after undergoing the same treatment. Once that’s done, Beth and Daryl get down to the business of wiping themselves off as best they can with the meager supplies they’ve got.

It's awkward as hell, but it’s also business as usual, seeing as this isn’t the first time Beth’s been half naked in front of Daryl Dixon. No privacy during the apocalypse, and even if they had the illusion of it at the prison, those days are over. She’ll just have to deal.  

And she is. Dealing. She _is_. She’s shivering in a gutted bathroom, stripped down to her sports bra and ugly granny panties with the waistband that’s clinging to her hips by a couple of threads, scrubbing a damp washcloth over her stinkier parts and wondering a bit frantically if any of the other trailers are stocked with luxuries like soap and toothpaste, and she’s miserable and hungover but she’s _dealing_.

Daryl hasn’t stripped off his jeans (it’s possible that he’s not wearing underwear, but Beth’s too afraid to ask). He _has_ , however, taken off his shirt, which makes Beth feel a little better about the acres of pasty white skin that _she’s_ uncovered. It makes her feel better because Daryl doesn’t take his shirt off in front of just anyone, on account of his belting scars, and Beth can’t help but wonder if he did it _because_ he wanted to make her feel better. If he didn’t want her to feel like the only vulnerable person in the room.

It’s kind of distracting. _Half-naked Daryl_ is distracting, because putting aside the ugly scars that make Beth want to dig his daddy out of his grave just to kill him all over again, and _slowly_ , it’s. It’s a nice view.

Beth huffs under her breath and averts her eyes, throttling the damp washcloth in a white-knuckled grip. The hell’s her problem? It’s not like she’s not used to seeing him underdressed. Not like he hasn’t got those arms of his hanging out in front of God and everybody all the damn time, looking like they could snap her spine easy as breaking a dry twig in half. The arms are nice— _real_ nice—but she’s used to those, or as used as a hormonal teenager with no outlet for her frustrations _can_ be to that sort of thing.

What she’s _not_ as used to are his fuzzy tummy and his flat brown nipples and the way his chest and abdomen are whiter than his arms and throat and the thin skin that stretches taut across his heavy collarbones.  

Beth wants to slap herself in the face with the washcloth, so she does, under the guise of wiping down her cheeks and forehead, even though that turns out to be a bad idea, seeing as the cloth stinks like her armpits now (note to self: find deodorant stat). She’s freaking _objectifying_ him, is what she’s doing, and you’d honestly expect it to be the other way around, but no. Daryl’s not even _looking_ at her. He’s barely _spoken_ to her, other than to grunt his thanks when she passed him the sliver of soap.

That’s the thing about Daryl. Ignorant folks might look at the pair of them travelling together and assume the worst, but Daryl’s not like that. Never has been. Daryl’s a hunter, sure, but he’s never made Beth _feel_ hunted. Has never made her feel like meat. Like prey.

Sometimes, though.

Sometimes, when it’s three in the morning and she can’t sleep on account of fear or adrenaline or just plain restlessness, she wonders what it would be like if he _did_ make her feel that way. Wonders how it would feel if he took her down like a deer, cut the hard scar on her wrist open with his sharp teeth, and sucked the marrow right out of her carpal bones. She’ll think about it, and she’ll press her knuckles against her crotch through her pants, kneading at the building ache like pressure will make it go away instead of just making it _worse_.

Daryl’s belt buckle clinks, snapping Beth out of her daze with a start. Her eyes dart over to him, and then swiftly away like a rabbit dodging a fox, cheeks all afire.  

Because.

Because Daryl’s got his body angled away from Beth’s, but Beth can tell what he’s doing, can guess at it based on the position of his arm. He’s got his hand down his pants. No, he’s got the _washcloth_ down his pants because he needs to wipe off his _dick_.

_Sweet suffering Jesus._

_It’s fine_ , Beth thinks wildly, heart in her throat. _It’s_ fine.

And it _is_ fine, because it’s got to be, and it’s not like Daryl’s never taken his dick out in front of her before. He took a piss in front of her just yesterday, for the good Lord’s sake. This is no different than that, only it _is_ , because Daryl _isn’t_ taking a piss, which is something that everybody does but is still kind of gross and definitely not sexy, and he’s _touching his dick right now_ , running the washcloth over it and maybe even deeper still between his legs, where it’s warm and dark and musky smelling, and it’s _fine_ , but it’s not, and Beth’s stomach feels like a swelling balloon fixing to _pop_ —

Oh, no. Nope, nope, _nope_. This can _not_ happen.

Beth’s burning up all over, and in a fit of desperation, she angles her body away from Daryl’s, mirroring him, and sticks _her_ washcloth down the front of _her_ underwear, ostensibly to wipe off her own crotch before it starts to smell like fish but also maybe in a last-ditch effort to cool off certain bits in mighty need of cooling.

Beth hears Daryl zip up his pants and buckle his belt, and she dares to relax as much as she ever does these days.  

Except.

“S’a dresser in the bedroom.”

Beth _yanks_ the washcloth out of her underwear, fumbles it, and drops it on the chilly tile with a wet plop that echoes as loud as gunfire in the closeness of the tiny bathroom. She goes to bend over and pick it up, only to realize that doing so would make her butt stick out like she was trying to draw attention to it. Her woozy head spins as she straightens up, and she near about gives herself whiplash in her hurry to turn and face him.  

Annnd he’s looking at her like he thinks she’s probably still drunk, or maybe just touched in the head. Great.

“Uh.” Beth clears her throat. Goes to cross her arms but ultimately doesn’t because that’ll just pulp up her breasts. Bad enough that her nipples have gone all hard from the draft in here, standing out like ripe cherries through her thin sports bra. Please, please, God, let him carry on with his established trend of not noticing that sort of thing.

Only, well, it’s very likely that he _does_ notice, because Daryl notices everything. It’s just that he probably doesn’t _care_.

Crossbow. She’s gonna learn to use Daryl’s crossbow, and then she’s gonna shoot herself with it.

Daryl shifts, and Beth realizes that she’s been quiet for too long. Daryl thinks of her as someone who can’t shut up to save her life, so this new laconic Beth Greene is probably wigging him out.

Beth fidgets, strumming the air with her fingers, and ventures, “What about the dresser?”

Daryl blinks like a spell just broke and snatches up his shirt from where he flung it over the side of the sink. He shrugs it on, doing up the buttons with his usual economy of movement, which, huh. Too bad.  

“Said you needed new clothes.” He nods at her shirt where it languishes stinkily in the far corner. “An’ you can’t go prancin’ around outside in your underthings. Figure there must be somethin’ in that dresser that’ll fit you alright.”   

Beth scoffs because she’s half naked in front of an older man on whom she _may or may not_ be harboring a deeply unfortunate crush and bravado is all she has left. “Why bother? Not like there’re any public decency laws left to break.”

Daryl’s eyes get all pissed off and squinty, which is how Beth knows that she’s worn his patience down to the bone. “More skin you got exposed, easier it’ll be for a walker t’get its teeth in ya. You fixin’ to lose a chunk’a your lily-white ass?”

He keeps talking about her ass, she’s gonna convince herself that he’s fixated on it or something.

“That’s rich,” Beth grumbles, but she’s already making for the door, putting both her back and her _lily-white ass_ to Daryl. “Comin’ from the guy who’s allergic to _sleeves_.”

Daryl cusses at her, but she just flips him off over her shoulder and shuts the bedroom door behind her. She wants to slam it, but she doesn’t. Can’t go around making too much noise if she doesn’t wanna bring a herd down on the trailer.

The plywood dresser, as it turns out, _does_ have a fair amount of clothes packed haphazardly into its drawers—if the person who owned this trailer abandoned it, they didn’t stop to pack much. Unfortunately, everything seems to be in men’s sizes, and a rather large man, at that. Also they all kind of smell bad.

In the end, Beth settles on a t-shirt emblazoned with the Jim Beam logo, which is also ironically the only shirt out of the bunch that doesn’t stink like stale booze, and the smallest pair of jeans she can find, although they’re still pretty dang baggy on her even after she cinches her belt as tight as she can through the loops.

She’s shoving her feet into her boots when Daryl knocks on the door.

“Y’ready?”

Beth considers saying no out of spite, but they’re burning daylight, and she’s already feeling guilty for regressing into the brat she acted like for most of yesterday, so she says, “Yeah,” and Daryl pushes open the door and leans against the jamb.

He squints at her outfit. Snorts.

“Don’t say it,” she warns.

“Didn’t say nothin’.”

“Yeah, but you were _thinkin’_ it.”

Daryl concedes her point with a shrug, then holds out something that he was fiddling with.

Sunglasses.

“Found these in the kitchen,” he says. “You want ’em?”

Beth nods hard and then regrets it when it aggravates her headache, snatching up the sunglasses and shoving them up the bridge of her nose. The relief is instant, forcing the pounding behind her eyes down to a dull throb, and she presses them shut for a second to savor the feeling.

“Bless you,” Beth says fervently, opening her eyes again. She cocks her hip, arms akimbo. “How do I look?”

Daryl’s lips twist into something that’s not quite a smile. “Like a goddamn Blues Brother.”

Beth rolls with it, flashing Daryl finger guns and doing her best John Belushi. “I’m on a mission from God.”

Daryl scoffs. “Yeah, whatever,” he says, pushing off the doorjamb to retrieve his crossbow and his vest and his backpack. “Jus’ getcha ass in gear, Elwood.”

There he goes again, talking about her ass like it’s his day job. No, seriously: he’s gotta stop that if he doesn’t want to give her _ideas_.

“I ain’t Elwood,” Beth says, half tripping after Daryl as he stalks quiet as a cat down the hall, patting her belt to make sure she didn’t forget her knife. “ _You’re_ Elwood. I’m Jake.”

Beth can’t see the look on Daryl’s face, but she suspects it’s longsuffering. “Thasso?”

Beth’s smile sneaks up on her. “Yeah, it _is_ so. ’Cause you’re taller’n me. An’ quieter.”

“I talk when there’s somethin’ worth sayin’. Wouldn’t kill you none to follow my example, neither.”  

They’re at the door now, and Daryl’s peering out the window next to it, scoping the area for walkers. Beth peeks over his shoulder, seeing lots of red maples and loblolly pines, and what once might’ve been a gravel road, but no dead men walking.

“What,” she teases as Daryl eases the door open an inch, two. “You my role model now or somethin’?”

“M’the only one you got,” Daryl mutters, and Beth’s smile falls away from her face at the terse reminder that him and her are all they have left now. “Now shut the hell up, ’less you wanna bring every damn walker in the fuckin’ county down on our heads.”

Beth sticks her tongue out at the back of his head but rolls it back into her mouth when the fresh air hits her face and her boots touch down on a wooden porch. Buttery sunlight cuts through the trees and bounces off her shades, but her headache doesn’t get any worse. The trailer’s lock works, but Daryl tells her to leave it on account of they don’t have a key, and he can’t afford to take the time to pick it. Beth nods absently at him, taking in their surroundings.

It’s a woodsy kind of area, not exactly a trailer park going by the couple of small houses scattered in with the double wides. The road that cuts through the trees in front of Beth and Daryl’s trailer is barely a road anymore, coated in pine needles and dead leaves and grown through with patches of grass, but what Beth can see of it snakes north and keeps going, winding through the neighborhood like a river. The air smells faintly of walkers, a sweet stinking rot that permeates everything it touches, but like Beth said, it’s _faint_. No herds in the area. Not yet, anyway. Not right now.

Daryl takes point because he always takes point, and also because he’s the only one of the two of them who carries a projectile weapon. Maybe they’ll manage to dig up some firearms while they’re here. Probably they will. Not to stereotype or anything, but this neighborhood looks like it was once occupied by the kind of people who would passionately defend the Second Amendment while ignoring most of the rest.

They climb down from the porch and onto the springy ground, and Daryl nods at the trailer situated north of theirs.

“We’ll check that’un out first,” he says quietly. “Go down the line from there. See how many we can loot in a day an’ then bed down in this one again for th’night.” He cranes his neck around to look at her, and she nods so he knows she’s amicable.

She sticks close to Daryl, making twice the amount of noise he does despite being half his weight. Eyeing a leaf-littered hulk that once might’ve been a car, she says, “Think you can hotwire us a ride before nightfall?”

Daryl’s shoulders move up and down. “I’ll try,” he says, which is the closest thing to a promise he can make her.

But then he stops abruptly, and Beth would’ve run into him nose first if she weren’t used to this kind of thing. His shoulders go tense, and he swings his crossbow to the left. Fires a bolt. Lowers the crossbow and trots over to the nearest tree, onto which, now that Beth looks at it properly, is pinned a very dead squirrel.

“Breakfast,” says Daryl, wrenching the bolt out of the squirrel. He retrieves a length of string from his pocket and hooks the squirrel to his belt like a redneck’s idea of a wallet chain.

Beth’s stomach stirs uneasily. “S’all yours,” she says. “M’not hungry.”

“Think you’re gonna puke?” Daryl asks as he takes point once again.

“Feel a little queasy,” Beth admits, trying very hard not to look at the squirrel where it dangles listlessly from Daryl’s belt. “Mostly I just don’t have much of an appetite.”  

Daryl makes a wordless noise of acknowledgment and mounts the second trailer’s porch with Beth close on his heels. He jiggles the knob, pushes, and the door swings open on squealing hinges. He peers inside, crossbow first, then whistles sharply at Beth to let her know it’s safe to proceed.

This trailer looks a lot like the one they took shelter in overnight: kitchen up front by the door, living room with a sagging sofa and a pair of stained La-Z-Boys, short hallway farther down with a pair of closed doors on either side.

The air has a stale, unlived in quality, but Beth still says, “Think anybody lives here?”

“Prob’ly not.” Daryl lowers his crossbow to dig onehanded through the kitchen cabinets, which are all painted an incongruously bright yellow. “Door would’a been locked otherwise.”

“Or maybe they stepped out for a minute and left it unlocked ’cause they’re like us and they don’t got any keys.”

“Burn that bridge when we get to it.”

“It’s ‘ _cross_ that bridge,’” Beth corrects him absently, even though she strongly suspects that his phrasing was deliberate. If people like Shane hadn’t already taught her as much, the Governor and his men would’ve driven home the fact that the living are often more dangerous than the dead.

“I think we’ll be okay, though,” Beth goes on when Daryl turns around clutching a cardboard box of granola bars. “Anybody fixin’ to mess with us’ll take one look at _you_ lookin’ like _that_ and turn tail.”

“Lookin’ like what?” Daryl challenges, slinging his crossbow over his shoulder so he can rip open the box of granola bars with all the delicacy of a wolf tearing into a deer’s soft underbelly.  

“Y’know, like—” Beth twists her face into a mean scowl behind her shades, grabbing her crotch crudely and swaggering a few steps. And it’s gross, ’cause they’re indoors, but she’s got a role that needs committing to, so she works up a glob of spit and hocks a fairly pathetic loogie onto the tan-and-taupe kitchen tile.

Daryl’s face curves into a meaner, truer version of the scowl Beth imitated, only it also kind of looks like he’s trying not to laugh. “I don’t fuckin’ walk like that,” he says, and then he makes a truly disgusting noise deep in his throat before spitting out an impressive glob of saliva. It’s even kinda green, like there’s some phlegm in there.

“ _Gross_ ,” Beth complains, like she wasn’t just spitting indoors, herself.

Daryl rips the packaging off a granola bar and bites it in half, turning back to the cabinets while Beth tries to decide what to do with herself. She should explore the rest of the trailer, probably, and if something happens, she’s got a sharp knife and a Dixon within screaming distance. Maybe she can find that shampoo she’s in desperate need of or dig up some clothes that actually fit. She’s making to do just that when Daryl stops her.

“Hey.” Daryl pulls something out of a cabinet and juggles it in his hand for a second before showing Beth the label. Jim Beam whiskey, just like her shirt. “Hair of the dog that bit ya. How’s about it, Greene?”

Beth’s stomach pitches even harder than it had when Daryl killed the squirrel, and she points a shaky finger at him like the barrel of a gun. “Swear to God, Dixon, I will throw up in your lap.”

“Swear to God, huh?” he mocks, and Beth huffs and storms off, muttering to herself about godless rednecks and all the things they’ve got coming to them.

Blade pulled from its sheath and hilt resting comfortably in her palm, Beth tests the first door on the right. The knob tries to stick, but she gives it a couple jiggles and it turns with a grate of resistance. Pleased, she steps across the threshold and squints into the room’s dim interior: it’s darker in here than out in the kitchen and living room—curtains on the window; she sees them now—and she risks pushing her sunglasses up onto her head. Her headache doesn’t spike, so she leaves them there.

And then she kind of wishes she hadn’t.

There’s a bed shoved up against the wall to her left. It’s a double bed with a low-slung mattress and maybe no box spring, and it’s covered in Power Rangers sheets.

Power Ranger sheets on the bed, tiny TV with a combo VCR on the navy-blue dresser, old chunky Nintendo on the floor, big tub of Legos in the far corner. The curtains are patterned with a collage of what look like Pokémon. If Beth dug through the dresser, she’d probably find clothes sized for a young boy. Some of those shirts might even fit her better than the one she’s wearing.

She doesn’t want to do that. She can’t. She should. They take what they can, these days. But she just—

Something scrapes along the floor. Not her—her feet are frozen at the threshold like somebody nailed them down. What she’s hearing is the scritch-scratch of nails on carpet fibers.

Rattling hiss. Hungry moan.

Something rises up from behind the bed. First the hands, rotted nearly to the bone so she can see the white gleam of its knuckles, ragged nails clutching at the Power Ranger sheets. Then the face, small and probably round, once, but gaunt and gray now. T-shirt hanging off its emaciated shoulder. Teeth clicking together because they’re _always_ clicking together, always trying to snag a bite of flesh. It’s the first thing a walker does when it rises: snaps its teeth in search of purchase. Beth knows, because she saw it happen with her momma and Shawn.

The kid—the walker—rises clumsily to its feet, tripping through several attempts, and Beth feels like a damn moron, frozen in place like some kinda greenhorn who’s never put the dead out of everyone’s misery before, like every single damn _idiot_ in every single damn horror movie _ever_ who gaped stupidly at the monster bearing down on them instead of _running like hell_.

But it.

It was a _kid_.

Right.

 _Was_.

Beth’s feet unstick. She crosses the small room, circles the bed. One hand twists in the faded t-shirt, and the other comes down with her knife, and there’s the give of softened bone, the squelch of ruined brain. One second the walker’s hissing and snapping and scrabbling to get her, and the next, it’s not. It’s limp, like it should’ve been to start with. Beth untwists her stiff fingers from its shirt, and it falls. Thuds onto the carpet.

“Beth!”

Daryl. Daryl’s in the doorway. He’s lowering his crossbow, and he’s assessing her. The knife dripping with walker viscera. The no doubt stark white of her face.

“You good?”

_You bit?_

No. No to both questions.

Beth wipes her knife clean on the Power Rangers bedspread and tucks it into its leather sheath.  

“Yeah,” she says. Lies. “I’m good.”


	3. there's no crying in baseball

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Convenient moment killers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you didn't read the chapter title in Tom Hanks's voice, just know that I'm deeply disappointed in you.

The rest of the trailer’s clear, save for an adult body in the bathroom with a hole in its skull and a handgun clutched in its mummified fingers. No bullets in the gun, but Daryl takes it anyway, tucking it into his backpack. Daryl and Beth take the adult’s body and the kid’s body, wrap them up in the Power Rangers sheets, and lay them out on the porch. Dump them there, really. Like garbage.

So. At least now they’re fairly certain that they’re not squatting in an occupied trailer.

This trailer’s better stocked than the one they woke up in, at least. Aside from the Jim Bean and Daryl’s granola bars, there’s Skippy and Pop Tarts and canned fruit in the cabinets, packaged soap and Beth’s prized shampoo in the bathroom. Tylenol, too, and it’s not even expired. First aid kit under the bathroom sink, which is an honest-to-God blessing. Shirts sized for adults in the second bedroom, but Beth doesn’t dig through those just yet. Can’t. Maybe won’t.

She pops the Tylenol in the bathroom and comes out to find Daryl hunkered down in one of the La-Z-Boys, knees spread, cigarette smoldering in his mouth; he must’ve found a lighter and the pack he’s got balanced on his thigh while Beth was in the bathroom. She doesn’t say anything about the stink, because the last time she scolded him for it, he blew smoke in her face. And anyway, what does it matter? Smoking won’t be the thing that kills him, or her, or anybody. Cancer’s too slow to do the job these days, unless you already had it well before the onset of the outbreak.

Daryl’s got his filled backpack resting at his feet and his crossbow propped up against the La-Z-Boy. He’s also got something clenched in his fist, and when Beth comes closer and sits down on the couch across from him, she sees that it’s a baseball, yellowed with age, stitching more pink than red. He squeezes it once, like a stress ball, then tosses it at Beth without warning.

She catches it, but just barely, fingers fumbling for purchase. Turns it over in her hands. There’s a signature scrawled across the curve of it, too smudged and faded for her to read. It was probably worth something, once. Not anymore.

She tosses it back across the negligible distance between her and Daryl, and his hand flashes up so fast it blurs. Figures.

“Y’ready to move on yet?” Beth asks him, and this time she's braced for the catch when Daryl tosses the ball to her. She bounces it on her palm for a couple of seconds before throwing it back.

Catch. “Once I’m finished smokin’ this. Figured you could use the break. Don’t wanna push you too hard when you’re still recoverin’ from your firs’ night’a heavy drinkin’.” Toss.

The baseball smacks into her palm. Her nails dig halfmoons into the leathery cowhide. “That’s mighty considerate of you, Mr. Dixon,” she drawls, all sardonic southern belle, but she means what she says. He made it sound like he was making fun of her, but that’s just his way of brushing off his own act of kindness, of directing her attention away from his mile-wide soft streak.

Daryl makes a grouchy noise around his cigarette and gestures for Beth to toss him the ball, which she does. They waste another handful of minutes like that while Daryl smokes his cigarette down to the filter, and the smell should make Beth’s headache worse, because she hates the burn of it in her nose even when she’s feeling her best, but it’s not actually bothering her all that much. Could be that she’s numb.

“Where else you been?”

Okay, so that’s a non sequitur if Beth’s ever heard one. She fumbles the ball, fingers thick and clumsy with surprise, and says, “Huh?”

Daryl wiggles his fingers, and Beth rolls her shoulders and throws him the ball. He plucks the spent cigarette out of his mouth and grinds it into the brown shag carpet beneath the heel of his boot.  

“Told you I never been outta Georgia. But you have.” 

“Uh.” The ball smacks into her waiting palm, just this side of painful. So maybe not so numb after all. “Yeah. Yeah, I have.”

“Where?”

Beth doesn’t know why he’s asking her this, why he seems to be initiating a conversation that skews dangerously close to small talk, which he hates, only she actually _does_ know. She knows why he’s doing this, because she saw the way he looked at her when they rolled those bodies into a little boy’s Power Ranger sheets and hauled them outside like bags of trash.

Daryl Dixon’s not much good at talking, but he’s not much good at hiding how he feels, either. At least not from her. _Least_ of all from her.

“Iunno.” Beth’s voice comes out stilted and halting because she doesn’t really want to talk, but she realizes even as she speaks that she wants to _try_. For him, because he’s trying for _her_. “Never been very far north. Never been far out west, either. Been to Florida a couple of times. We got—we _had_ —we had some cousins down in St. Petersburg. I never liked them much. Their house always smelled kinda funny.”

“Florida, huh?” Daryl asks, cutting through all the extraneous details Beth tossed at him and homing in on what’s relevant. His rough drawl drags the mundane proper noun into something that makes the nape of Beth’s neck prickle, and when he gestures for the baseball, she realizes that she’s been toying aimlessly with it for the last couple minutes. She tosses it back in a hurry, and he says, “What’s it like?”

“Iunno,” she repeats, because she’s a real brilliant conversationalist, is Beth Greene. “Uh. Like Georgia, I guess, but even swampier, and there’re palm trees everywhere.” A thoroughly halfhearted smile tugs at her mouth. “Even more’a those damn lovebugs, too.”

“Them bugs that fly around fuckin’ right in front'a your damn face?” Daryl asks, and Beth giggles in a strangled sort of way.

“Yeah, those ones.” But it gives Beth a funny and not altogether unpleasant feeling in her stomach to be talking about _fucking_ with Daryl Dixon, even if they’re just talking about _bugs fucking_. Not unpleasant, no, but definitely unnerving, so she scrambles to change the subject. “Went to Disney World, once.”

Toss. Catch. More of the same in total silence, and Beth wonders with an icy shot to her stomach if she’s just made a mistake. If he’ll retreat into his shell and leave her with nothing but the buzz of crickets and the distant groans of walkers for company.

Instead, he says, a bit haltingly and not quite meeting her eyes, “You like it there?”

Beth breathes shakily out. Okay. Okay, so maybe she _hasn’t_ screwed this up quite yet, or at least she hasn’t screwed it up beyond all repair. “I mean, yeah,” she says. “Like I said, we only went the once, but it was…nice. Crowded, and I mean _crowded_.” Crowded in a way the world never is anymore, unless you’re talking crowds of walkers. “Don’t think you would’ve liked it much.”

“Prob’ly wouldn’t’ve.”

“Guess it’s still there,” Beth says, more to herself than to Daryl, eyes going unfocused and distant. “Full’a walkers, just like everywhere else.”

She can picture how it must look, too. Shutdown rides, empty ticket booths. Walkers bloating in the harsh Florida sun and getting all waterlogged in the afternoon summer showers. Shambling around the place like nightmarish distortions of those damn creepy animatronics that Beth never really liked.

Beth blinks. Realizes that it’s her turn to toss the ball, so she does. “I liked the princesses,” she recalls. She’s doing most of the talking now, but that’s how it always is between them, anyway, and Daryl’s never been one to hide his irritation. If he wants her to shut up, she’ll know. “Cinderella was my favorite, although I liked Jasmine and Belle, too.”

Daryl scoffs, and Beth’s eyes dart to his face, which is twisted with disdain. _And there it is_.

“Ain’t Cinderella the one with the shitty family?” he asks. “Girl’s life sucked ass. The hell's there to like?”

“Sure, it sucked,” Beth says, a little heatedly because princesses are serious business, and Daryl’s not getting the _point_. “It sucked like hell, but Cinderella never let her crappy stepfamily make her mean. She didn’t turn into _them_. She stayed kind, and she persevered, and she got out. She got to be happy.”

Daryl’s got the ball now, but he doesn’t toss it back to her. No, he squeezes it again, squeezes it so hard Beth wouldn’t be surprised if it burst like an overripe orange, like a _Florida_ orange.

“Growin’ up in a shitty house with shitty people, that don’t make you _kind_. It don’t make you fuckin’ _brave_. It makes you _scared_. It pisses you the _fuck_ off.”  

And Beth’s thinking, _Abort, abort, abort_ , but it’s too damn late, isn’t it? She’s gone and shoved her foot in her mouth all over again, and she doesn’t know how to fix what she’s broken. Daryl Dixon, much to her dismay, doesn’t come with an instruction manual.

Hurting people never do, and shouldn’t she know that better than anyone?

But then Daryl sags into the La-Z-Boy like a tire losing air, hand going slack around the baseball. He gives her a half-hunted, half-apologetic look from under his bangs, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t extend an olive branch. This is on _her_.

Beth draws her knees up to her chest, halfway to a fetal position. She’s gotta—she just—

“Um,” she tries. “Daddy just…Daddy really loved _Cinderella_. He’d always liked the Perrault story best, but he liked the Disney movie, too. Said it carried a good Christian message about kindness and perseverance in the—in the face of adversity. That’s why I liked it so much, ’cause he liked it too.”  

Her eyes are wet. So’s her face. Wet, but not wet with the tacky thickness of blood. It’s thinner than that, cleaner than that.

She licks her lips and tastes salt.

When did she start crying, exactly?

She squeezes her eyes shut like she can hold the tears in that way, but she can hear just fine, and what she hears is Daryl cussing hard enough to turn the air around him blue. Hears the baseball bounce off the floor. Hears the La-Z-Boy creak. Feels the displacement of air and the solid weight of a body sinking into the couch cushion beside hers.

And there’s a hand. On her shoulder, warm through her pilfered t-shirt. Uncertain, like the hand on her elbow was when she’d impulsively hugged him in her cell. His callused thumb sketches a shaky circle across the wing of her collarbone.

“Hey,” he mumbles, sounding a little like he’s choking on what he wants to say. “M’sorry. I was a dick.”

Yeah, he was, but Beth gets _why_ he was, and anyway, that’s not even the problem. The problem is that her father is dead and that her sister very might well be and that she hasn’t even had a chance to _mourn_ them because you can’t grieve properly when you’re running for your life, when you’re bouncing from place to place and you know you can’t settle down because when you settle down you _have_ something, and when you have something, you also have something to lose. Something that can be taken from you.   

Katana hacking into her father’s neck, swing too poor to even make a clean slice all the way through. Machine gunfire, storm of grief like a hale of bullets. Prison going up in flames, and then she’d gone and set the shack on fire, too, and it was supposed to be a form of catharsis, but maybe she just wanted to watch something burn with a fire that _she_ had set. Maybe she wanted to harness destruction and use it instead of being the one to run from it.

She told Daryl, once, that she didn’t cry anymore, and at the time, she’d been telling the truth. She hadn’t cried for weeks when she’d told Daryl that, but then the Governor killed her father in front of her, and it was like tapping into a well. She still can’t cry for Zach, but she can cry for her father. For Glenn and Maggie. For Rick and Carl and Judy. For those bodies by the train tracks. For the bodies on the porch. For Daryl.

For herself.

Beth sucks down her tears. Sucks up snot. Chokes something out between pitiful little hiccups.

“Can I—can I have a hug?”

She sounds plaintive, like the child she doesn’t want him to think of her as, and the hand on her shoulder goes stiff, fingers pulling up tense, and she fucked up again. Daryl doesn’t like being touched much, but he’s let her hold him twice now, and she thought maybe—but she’s so stupid; of course he wouldn’t want—

Except the stiff hand on her shoulder turns into a heavy arm across her back, and he tugs her sideways into his chest, and there’s the musky smell of him plugging up her nostrils and a bristly chin resting lightly, so lightly, on the crown of her head, his nose nudging her sunglasses. And it’s awkward as all hell because he still doesn’t know how to hug another person, but it’s also genuine, and he’s _trying_ , trying for _her_ sake. Trying because he cares about her, and they’re family, and they’re all they have left.

Beth chokes something back. Maybe it’s a laugh, maybe it’s a sob, maybe it’s a union of both.

“Thanks.” She sounds nasal and clotted, but she _has_ to say it. Has to convey to him how much this means to her. How much _he_ means to her.

He shifts. _Squirms_ , really, leather vest sliding slick across Beth’s wet cheek. “Don’t need to thank me,” he says, abrupt and a little rude, not because he’s feeling mean, but because he’s feeling _embarrassed_.

Jesus. Lord Jesus, who would even guess just from looking at him that Daryl Dixon isn’t gruff because he’s mean—although he’s got meanness in him, too—but because he’s _shy_? Shy, and sweet in his way. Gentle, like the arm around her, like the fingers dragging back and forth along her shoulder blade.

The breath Beth pulls in is wet and shaky, but there aren’t any fresh tears surging up, so she dares to shuffle back a little. Not far enough to break Daryl’s hold on her, because he’s warm and she’s starved for affection, but enough to look him in the eye.

To look him in his eyes, and to watch in mute fascination as those eyes dart away from hers. As his cheeks and nose bloom with hot color. As he gnaws on his thin lower lip, fingers twitching convulsively against Beth’s shoulder like he wants to gnaw on those, too.

Beth’s lips part. Daryl’s eyes dart south of her nose, then skitter away again, and her ears start to buzz. That ballooning feeling from when they washed up together is back in her stomach.

They’re having a Moment. She’s almost certain that they are, and she’s even more certain that Daryl’s fixing to break it, to take a pin to Beth’s balloon. Because, what? Because she’s _too young_? Because he’d be _taking advantage of her_? This poor clueless man should probably be more worried about _her_ taking advantage of _him_.

Only, Daryl _doesn’t_ break the moment.  

Beth does.

She doesn’t _want_ to. She’d happily ride this tension out to its inevitable conclusion, whatever that conclusion may be, but there’s a flash in the corner of her eye like an afterimage, only it’s _not_ an afterimage, and there’s this prickling on the back of her neck like she gets from being watched, nothing at all like the familiar weight of _Daryl’s_ attention. She turns her head whip-crack quick, knocking her sunglasses askew, and Daryl’s hold on her falls away. He follows her gaze and levers himself off the couch.

“What is it?” he asks, because he’s quick on the uptake, is Daryl Dixon.

Beth gets to her feet, too, hands braced on the back of the couch, the ragged edges of her nails catching in the woven fibers like the walker’s had in the carpet.

There’s nothing there now, but there _was_. Beth _knows_ there was, just like she knows that it wasn’t a walker.

“I saw someone,” she says. “I saw someone in the window.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can tell you right now what it was that Beth saw in the window.
> 
> Plot.
> 
> It was the plot.


	4. children shouldn't play with dead things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for brief discussion of rape.

Beth goes to open the door, but Daryl blocks the way before she can so much as get her hand around the knob. Her first instinct is to try and push past him, but honestly, who is she even _kidding_? Daryl’s not much taller than her, but he’s _bigger_. Heavier. His biceps are as wide around as her _thighs_ , for the good Lord’s sake. He’s not moving until he’s damn well ready to, and they both know it.

“The hell’re you goin’?” he demands, and if Beth wasn’t bristling before, she is _now_.

So she clenches her fists and sticks out her chin. It’s all posturing, and they both know it, but, hell, it won’t hurt her any to _try_. “What’s it look like? I’m gonna go check things out.”

“The fuck you are.”

Beth is suddenly and _brutally_ overtaken by the urge to _shove_ him, which she knows would do her about as much good as trying to knock over the Rock of Gibraltar, but that’s the thing about anger: it’s very rarely rational, and very often violent.

She won’t be violent, though. Daryl knows violence. Daryl’s _used_ to violence. No, she’s gonna knock him dead with sheer force of verbal persuasion, is what she’s gonna do. So she unclenches her fists and raises one hand, not to shove him, but to point a finger in his face.

“Don’t you go treatin’ me like a kid, Daryl Dixon. This isn’t gonna work out if you can’t treat me like an adult.”

 _This won’t work out_ , she says, as if either of them have any other options. As if either of them have anybody but each other.

But that’s _why_ it can’t go sour. They’re a unit. They’re a _team_. If either one of them screws this up beyond all repair, they’re done for.

Daryl narrows his eyes. He’s looking at Beth’s finger like he’s contemplating biting it off, so she drops it to her side. Just in case.

“Ain’t treatin’ you like no fuckin’ _kid_ ,” he growls, and Beth can feel the sound in her belly. Hell, she’s pretty sure the hair on the nape of her neck’s standing on end. “I can’t hunt down some peepin’ psycho _an’_ keep your ass safe at the same goddamn time. So do me a goddamn favor and stay. Fuckin’. _Put_.”

Beth’s standing between him and his crossbow. She’s fast on her feet, and her lighter weight could work in her favor. It’s possible that she could grab the bow and make a break for it before Daryl knew what hit him. Possible, but not likely, and also something that a ‘fuckin’ kid’ would probably do.

Speaking of kids.

“That’s the thing, though.” Beth forces herself to speak evenly. Forces her hackles down. “I don’t think it _was_ some psycho.”

Daryl mirrors Beth, his own defensive posture relaxing by degrees. But _only_ by degrees.  

“Yeah?” he says. “The hell was it, then? You said some _one_ , so I’m guessin’ it weren’t no walker.”

Beth shakes her head, ponytail swinging like a pendulum along her shoulder blades. This is going better than expected. See what you can accomplish when you behave like a rational adult?

“It wasn’t,” she says. “At least, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.”

“‘Pretty sure’ don’t count for shit these days.”

 _Rational. Adult_. “Okay, I’m like, _ninety-nine percent sure_ that it wasn’t a walker.” Going off the look on Daryl’s face, that’s _still_ not good enough, but it’s all she can give him right now. “But I’m just about dead certain it was a kid.”

Daryl’s face cycles through several emotions before settling on wary curiosity. “A kid, huh?”

“Think so. Was too small to be a grown adult, anyway.”

Daryl folds his arms. Picks at his cuticles. “A _livin’_ kid?”

Beth doesn’t flinch. Daryl’s not weaponizing cruelty, here, although yesterday drove home the fact that he’s devastatingly good at it when he wants to be. He knows that the walker kid in the bedroom hit her like a gut punch, and she wouldn’t be the first person he’s met who saw things that weren’t there on account of trauma.  

But she _wasn’t_ seeing things. She wasn’t. Or at least, she wasn’t seeing anything that wasn’t already there.

“Pretty sure it was.” Daryl scowls, but again: it’s the best she can give him right now, and it would only piss him off more if she lied or exaggerated. “Didn’t move like a walker, an’ its skin was too pink.” Even freshly risen walkers that haven’t had time to rot much are still distinctly gray about the gills, and the flash of round face that Beth saw didn’t have any particular pallor to it.  

Daryl bites at his thumbnail, eyes darting around the room as he thinks. Beth’s just about ready to start tapping her foot when he releases his thumb from the clasp of his teeth and moves around Beth to retrieve his crossbow.

Beth can’t help but notice that Daryl moving out of the way gives her a clear shot to the door. If she wanted to book it, now would be the time.

She doesn’t. Like she said: rational adult, and she can’t go knocking down what they’ve built together. She can’t alienate the only friend she’s got left in the entire world.

“A’right.” Beth twists on the spot to watch Daryl sling the crossbow over his shoulder. He leaves the backpack where it is; presumably Beth’s to stay and watch it. “You lock this door, an’ you don’t open it for no one but me, y’hear? Somebody manages to knock it down an’ give you trouble, I don’t care if they’re livin’ or dead, you stab first and ask questions later. Got it?”  

Beth nearly responds with a snarky, ‘Yes, Dad,’ but decides that that would be awful for, Jesus, so many reasons. And anyway, something’s just occurred to her. Something that might actually move the Rock of Gibraltar.

Beth watches Daryl pad over to the door and waits until he’s unlocked it and wrapped his fingers around the knobs before she says, “I still think you should take me with you.”

Daryl’s fingers spasm around the knob, and he gives her a beady-eyed look over his shoulder. “This ain’t up for popular vote. You’re stayin’ here.”

Beth shrugs loosely, trying for casual and maybe even succeeding. It helps that the longsuffering look on Daryl’s face is making her want to laugh.

“I’m just sayin’, if it _is_ a kid, they might react more—more positively to my presence than they would to yours. No offense.”

Daryl turns around, and if his arms weren’t full of crossbow, he’d probably be folding them across his chest right about now. He says, flatly, “That right?”

It occurs to Beth that she just might be treading on some paper-thin ice, here, but she’s not who she used to be, either. Where once she might’ve folded under the weight of Daryl’s glare, now she just firms her chin and forges on.

“I mean, _I_ know that you’re harmless—”

Daryl makes a noise not unlike a snarl, and Beth rushes to get to the point before he loses what patience he has left and leaves her hogtied on the couch.

“—but you’re a stranger an’ a grown man, an’ you’re kinda scary-lookin’, too, an’ people these days are wary, right? They gotta be.”

There’s truth in what she’s saying—she’s not just playing things up for her own benefit. Used to be that lots of men would take what they want without asking, and that was when there where laws in place to discourage that sort of thing. Daryl’s not that kind of man, but a lot of people would take one look at him and _assume_ that he was. Women and children especially, and it’s sad, but with the way things are, it’s safer for them to make false assumptions than it is to trust armed strangers.

Daryl adjusts his crossbow. “Girl, make your damn point already.”

Right. Thin ice, high noon. “Uh, so, if it _is_ a kid, they might trust me more than they’d trust you. ’Cause I’m a woman, and ’cause I look a lot like a kid, too. I mean, I know I’m _not_ a kid, but I look. I look kinda young for my age. Don’t I?”

As soon as she says it, she realizes that she probably doesn’t want to draw Daryl’s attention to just how young she looks, or to just how young she actually _is_ , but there’re more urgent matters at hand than her stupid schoolgirl crush. Also, the more time they waste in here, the more likely they are to lose the kid.

Daryl, for his part, looks unimpressed, and Beth’s just resigned herself to what’s sure to be a resounding ‘no’ when he says, “Jesus, fine.”

“C’mon, Daryl, can’t you just—” Beth cuts herself off. “Uh. What’d you say?”

“Don’t much like repeatin’ myself.”

A smile catches on Beth’s mouth and grows. The wider she smiles, the surlier Daryl looks, but she _doesn’t even care_ , okay, because she did it. She moved the Rock of Gibraltar.

“Alright,” she says, a little breathless from the high of it. Hangover _who_? “Cool. Great. I’ll just—” She scoops up Daryl’s backpack, straps dangling from her arm. “You wanna carry this, or should I? I can, if you want.”

Daryl grumbles something rude under his breath and turns away from Beth, so she shrugs and slides the straps over her shoulders, bouncing on her toes to get the bag to settle comfortably against the small of her back. Those cans of fruits are probably gonna pound bruises into her skin if she at any point has to run, but it is what it is. She’ll take it.

Daryl pushes the door open, and the sunlight filtering through the tree branches hits Beth square between the eyes. She scrambles to shove her sunglasses into place, swearing quietly. Hell, what was she thinking? How does she expect to find a lost child in the state she’s in?

Well, that’s why she has Daryl. Not like she expected to do much of the finding, here, anyway.

“You stay behind me, a’right?” Daryl’s saying, feet padding soundlessly across the porch. “An’ I don’t want you takin’ off after that kid, neither.”

“Shouldn’t I be the first one they see, though?” Beth asks. Daryl ignores her, which, fine. Screw him anyway.

“Fine,” Beth mumbles, rolling her eyes behind her sunglasses. “But when they see you comin’ with that giant crossbow an’ that nasty look on your face an’ make a break for it, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

“An’ when a walker bites you in your ass, don’ say _I_ didn’t tell _you_ so.”

No, seriously: what _is_ it with this man and her ass?

Maybe she’s reading too much into it.

_Focus, Greene._

“Which way’d it go?”

“Uh.” Beth points over Daryl’s shoulder, east ways. “That way. I think.”

“You _think_?”

“It’s the best I’ve got, jeez.”

Beth can practically _feel_ Daryl’s blood pressure going up, but he crosses to the other side of the gravel road and kneels in the dirt, scraping dead leaves aside and studying what he sees.

Tracks. Small enough to be a child’s, Beth’s pretty sure. She can’t tell how fresh they are, but she knows Daryl can.

“How old’re they?”

“Less than an hour,” Daryl says with certainty, and if it were anyone else, Beth might question the accuracy of his estimate, but he _isn’t_ anyone else. He’s Daryl goddamn Dixon. “Hell, less than _half_ an hour.”

“So I was right,” Beth says, a little smug.

Daryl makes an unimpressed noise, rocking back on his heels to push to his feet. “Don’t go gettin’ too excited,” he warns. “Could still be a walker’s.”

“Could be,” Beth allows. “But it ain’t.” Of that, she’s certain. She knows what she saw.

Daryl squints at her, then shakes his head, mussing up his already messy bangs. “Y’sound mighty sure’a yourself, there, Sherlock.”

Beth doesn’t let herself smile until Daryl’s back is turned. “Thought I was a Blues Brother.”

“Nah. Changed my mind. A Blues Brother could hold his liquor.”  

 _“_ If I’m Sherlock, does that make you Watson?”

Daryl’s shoulders pull up tense, and Beth’s expecting him to tell her to shut the hell up, but he doesn’t. His head whips to one side like a hound scenting a rabbit, which, well—Beth guesses that’s not inaccurate. He swings his crossbow up, only to let it droop, cursing under his breath. ANd that’s how Beth knows. Even before she follows Daryl’s gaze and squints at the little face peering around the trunk of that maple over there, she knows.

This is what Beth sees: the soft curve of a cheek still padded with baby fat and a mop of wavy hair. Beth can’t tell if they’re a boy or a girl. Can’t tell what their eye color is, either, but through the tint of her sunglasses, she thinks their hair might be brown, or maybe even auburn.

They’re not running, either. So there’s that.

But then Daryl moves, and the little hand wrapped around the tree trunk curls, nails digging into the bark. Beth touches his shoulder, and when he looks at her, she shakes her head.

“Let me,” she says.

And he does. He doesn’t look happy about it, but he lets her take point on this.

Beth smiles gratefully at him, and he makes an impatient sound low in his throat. Right. She’s gotta get a move on if she doesn’t want the kid running off before she can even say hello.

And how _does_ she go about saying hello? Beth’s good with kids, always has been, but the world’s different than it was, and a hand outstretched in welcome can always turn into fingers wrapped around the handle of a knife.

Speaking of. Beth slowly unhooks her sheathed knife from her belt, and when she presses it into Daryl’s palm, he says, “ _Beth_.”

 _Beth. Don’t be fuckin’ stupid_.

She’s not being stupid, though. This is the right thing to do. She knows it is.

“It’s okay.” She speaks quietly even though she’s fairly certain that they’re well out of the kid’s earshot, but better safe than sorry. “I trust you.” _I trust you to protect me_.

He twitches a little at that, like she struck him, then sighs hard through his nose and nods sharply.  

“G’on, then.”

Right. Unarmed and with her hands held palm up, Beth takes a step. Then another. The kid doesn’t tense the way they did when Daryl moved, but they don’t come any closer, either. They don’t come out from behind that tree.

And that’s another thing. Beth _needs_ to get this kid indoors before a walker stumbles out from behind one of the other trees and grabs them.

“Hey.” Beth takes another couple of tentative steps before sinking to her knees and sitting back on her heels, toes of her boots digging into the dirt. “I’m Beth. What’s your name?”

No response, but Beth expected as much.

She indicates Daryl with a nod, never taking her eyes off the child in front of her. “This’s my friend, Daryl. I know he looks scary, but he’s actually real nice.”

Beth might be imagining it, but she thinks Daryl scoffs at that. Well, whatever. This is Beth’s rodeo, and he’ll just have to deal.

Smiling warmly, Beth goes on, “See that crossbow’a his? Y’ever heard of Robin Hood? Daryl’s a little bit like that.”

Daryl makes another noise, and this one is _definitely_ a scoff.

Beth cups her empty hands around her knees, feeling naked without her knife but knowing, deep in her bones, that she made the right call. Just like she knows that Daryl won’t let anything hurt her. Not her, and not that kid, either.

“I know you don’t know us.” Beth pushes her sunglasses off her nose even though the light hurts her eyes, because she wants this kid to see her face unobstructed, to read the honesty in it. “I know your parents probably told you not to talk to strangers, ’specially with the way things are now. But I promise you, we just wanna get you inside where it’s safe.”

Beat of hesitation. That little head cocks to one side, birdlike, unruly bangs flopping into a wide pair of eyes. The hand on the trunk tenses, and Beth’s bracing herself to get up and run after them, to hell with the consequences, when she hears the crunch of feet on dead leaves.  

Not walker feet. The kid’s.

The kid comes out from behind the tree, one hand still braced on the trunk, and they’re wearing a yellow hoodie and a floral skirt. Okay: girl, then. Probably, anyway.

She’s also noticeably not that dirty, cheeks pink and clean, and her hair—auburn, definitely auburn—is unruly, sure, and overgrown, but it’s not tangled, either.

Someone. Someone’s been taking care of this child. Either that, or she’s remarkably self-sufficient for a maybe-eight-year-old.

She doesn’t get much closer than it takes to come out from behind the tree, but she _does_ finally say something.

“I’m Jude.”

Oh. _Oh_. It hits Beth in the gut, that name, and she can only hope the pain of it doesn’t realize itself on her face as a twisted grimace. She thinks she hears Daryl inhale sharply. Maybe not.

Beth clears her throat, struggling to speak past the forming lump. “Hi, Jude. That’s a real pretty name.”

“Thanks.” She’s got good manners, has Jude, which only strengthens Beth’s suspicion that an adult’s taking care of her. “It’s like the Beatles song.”

Beth smiles, and it’s almost real. “You like the Beatles, Miss Jude?”

Jude shakes her head, once. “Momma does.”

Beth turns to look at Daryl and sees what she’s feeling reflected in his face.

Right. Okay. Beth turns back to Jude. “You and your momma live around here?”

Another nod. “I can take you to her. If you want.”

That could go well. It could also go horribly, _violently_ wrong. “Your momma okay with you talkin’ to strangers?”

Shrug of tiny shoulders. “I’ve brought strangers home t’her before. She won’t get mad.” Shy curve of a smile. “Not at me, anyway.”

Okay. _Okay_. Beth stands up, slowly, but Jude doesn’t bolt. “Can I talk to my friend here for a second?”

Jude just shrugs again. No skin off her nose, clearly.

Beth turns to Daryl, ducking her head in close.  

“Whatcha think?” she asks quietly, although Jude’s standing close enough now that she can probably catch at least some of what they say no matter how softly they speak.

Daryl’s expression is not encouraging. “Think people’ve been usin’ kids to bait traps since forever. How’s we to know if this momma of hers is really a _momma_ an’ not a bunch’a perverts lookin’ for a pretty young girl to rape?”

So, Daryl just implied that he thinks Beth is pretty in the worst context possible. Great. This day could not possibly get any worse.

More importantly.

“An’ I think _you’re_ bein’ a damn pessimist,” Beth hisses, hoping to God that Jude didn’t hear any of that. “Know what else I think? I think that, if she _is_  livin' with a bunch’a perverts, we can’t just _leave_ her with ’em.”

Beth knows she’s got him as soon as she says it. Daryl’s never been one to turn away the helpless. To turn away _children_. If he so much as _suspects_ that anyone’s abusing this child, he won’t let it continue. He’ll die before he lets it continue.

And, there: Daryl’s face goes flat, but there’s a kind of resignation in his eyes. Yeah. He’ll do what he has to.

“What’re you guys talkin’ about?”

Beth doesn’t start, because it takes a lot to throw her off these days, but her heart _does_ give an anxious thump. She looks down, and there’s Jude, closer than she was before, peering solemnly up at them through her overgrown bangs.

Her eyes are blue, like Rick’s. Like Carl’s.

Like Judith’s.

“Just tryin’ to decide if it’s safe to go with you, sweetie,” Beth says, as honestly as she can, because kids have mighty strong bullshit detectors, every single last one of them, and if Jude thinks she’s being condescended to, she really might run off in a fit.

“Safe as anythin’ is anymore,” Jude says, almost disturbingly adult in her delivery, in what she’s saying and what it implies, and Beth adds another couple of years onto her age.

Or maybe she really _is_ no older than Beth’s original guess. Maybe she’s like Carl. Maybe growing up after the end of the world aged her in ways that have nothing to do with her physical maturity.

Jude curls her hand around Beth’s and gives her arm a gentle tug.

“C’mon,” she says. “Momma’ll be mad if I’m out for too long.”

At a loss for what else to do, Beth allows herself to be pulled along. Daryl follows close on their heels, armed with his crossbow and Beth’s knife.

“What were you—” Beth stumbles over a rock, but Jude doesn’t even skip a step. “What were you doin’ outside without your momma? It’s not safe out here.”

“Heard voices. Momma was nappin’. Guess the voices were yours.”

“Guess they were,” says Beth. God, she _hopes_ they were.

The trailer Jude stops in front of is a little more rundown than the ones to either side of it, but there are flowerboxes on the narrow porch and lace curtains in the windows. It looks…cozy. Lived in. _Living_.

Jude squeezes Beth’s hand before letting go and skipping up the porch steps. She produces a keyring from her hoodie’s pocket and plugs one of the keys into the front door’s lock.

“Comin’?” she calls back to Beth and Daryl.

Daryl looks sidelong at Beth. Passes over her knife, which she hooks onto her belt.

He’s trusting her judgment, here, the way she trusted him to cover her while she was unarmed and defenseless.

Right. Okay.

“Comin’,” says Beth, and when Daryl shoulders in front of her to mount the porch, she lets him. If the trailer really _is_ full of predatory assholes and the first thing they see is a crazy redneck with a crossbow and a dead squirrel dangling from his belt, fine. But if it’s just Jude’s momma in there and the first thing _she_ sees is a crazy redneck with a crossbow and a dead squirrel dangling from his belt, well…

Burn that bridge when they get to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some things: 
> 
> 1) You probably noticed that I changed the rating. I had to do this because I took a long look at my outline and realized, "Huh. This is gonna get a lot more explicit than I'd originally intended." I'm sure you're all shocked and disappointed. 
> 
> 2) Much like Daryl's blood pressure, my estimated word count for this fuckin' thing just keeps going up.
> 
> 3) Thank y'all kindly for the love. Bethyl folks are real sweet ❤️


	5. what we have here is a failure to communicate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somebody oughta take a hose to these two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The TW from Chapter 4 still applies: brief discussion of rape. Please be careful with yourselves ❤️

Daryl’s bulky shoulders are blocking Beth’s line of sight, so she hears the click of a hammer being cocked before she sees the abbreviated barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.

Daryl’s already got his crossbow up and aimed, and most folks might scoff at the notion of a bolt standing half a chance against a bullet, but most folks aren’t well acquainted with Daryl Dixon. Beth’s seen him beat worse odds with less.

Still. It’d be real nice if nobody got shot today, be it by an arrow or a bullet. Be real nice if they could resolve this all nice and peaceful, like.  

It’s with that hope in mind that Beth peers around the curve of Daryl’s bicep to get a better look at who—and what—they’re dealing with.

A woman, it turns out, and she seems to be alone—save for Jude, of course, who’s peeking out from behind her hip the same as Beth’s peering around Daryl’s arm. The stranger is Daryl’s age, maybe, and tall. She’s got reddish-brown hair scraped back from her face in a tight ponytail and steep frown lines carving trenches on either side of her mouth. She’s also got the look of a woman who knows how to use the gun in her hands.

No surprise, there. Beth doubts that there’s anyone left alive who doesn’t know how to fire a gun.

“Who the hell’re you?” the woman demands, apparently having finished sizing Beth and Daryl up.

“Jus’ a couple’a folks mindin’ they own business,” says Daryl, and the stranger with the sawed-off laughs. It’s not a happy sound.

“Seems to me like you were mindin’ my _daughter’s_ business.”

“Seems to me like she was mindin’ _ours_.”

The barrel of the gun dips for a second before straightening out again. The woman doesn’t take her eyes off Beth and Daryl—okay, fine: mostly Daryl—but Beth’s got a feeling that she _wants_ to, the better to scowl down her long nose at her daughter.  

“Jude,” she says, pronouncing her daughter’s name in that way peculiar to disappointed parents, and, God. Beth can’t think of that right now.  “You sneak out again while I was sleeping?”

Beth can’t see much of Jude from here, but she thinks the little girl shrugs.

“Nothin’ was gonna get me. I got my butterfly knife, and Beth an’ Daryl were with me.”

Daryl shifts his weight, and maybe he’s only adjusting his bow, but Beth thinks he might be reacting to the revelation that Jude was armed this whole time. Sure, a little girl with a little knife stands very little chance against two grown adults, but Beth was unarmed when she went up to Jude, and had Jude been a different sort of child, one made feral by the awfulness of everyday living—if this _had_ been a trap—then Beth might’ve gotten herself stabbed in the eye or the gut before Daryl could reach her.

It gives Beth a little chill, to think of how things could’ve gone.

Jude’s mother looks like she wants to shut her eyes and pray for patience, and maybe she would if she weren’t watching Daryl’s every move. As it is, she makes a noise not unlike a puma’s snarl.  

“ _Girl_ ,” she grinds out. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times—you see a stranger, you run for the goddamn hills.”

“Ain’t no hills ’round here,” says Jude, and Beth swallows a bubble of laughter that could potentially get her shot.   

“ _Aren’t_ ,” the woman snaps, and Beth is irresistibly reminded of her momma telling her or Maggie or Shawn to put a nickel in the Dropped G’s Jar. And like the thought drew her attention, the stranger’s eyes slide past Daryl and land on Beth. “And what about you? You got a tongue, or did the dirtbag over there cut it out?”

A muscle twinges in Daryl’s jaw. “You’d best watch _your_ tongue, ’less you wanna lose it.”

The woman just smiles, bitter as cough syrup. “Wasn’t talking to you, redneck.” She nods at Beth. “I was talking to _her_.”

“I got a voice.” That voice is a little hoarse, too, because. Well. This lady’s got a _gun_ on them. “And I’d really appreciate it if you were to point that thing somewhere else. We don’t mean you or your daughter any harm, and I think you know that already.”

The bitter smile takes on a sharper edge. “Oh, do I?”

“Sure, you do,” Beth says, faking confidence like it’s going out of style. “You’d’ve already shot us dead otherwise, and anyway, if we wanted to hurt your daughter, we had plenty’a chances on the way here, and we didn’t take none of them.”

It’s a compelling argument, in Beth’s humble and unbiased opinion. At the rate she’s been going, it’s a wonder she never made her high school’s debate team—probably because she’d never auditioned in the first instance, having been too shy to talk in front of that many strangers.

Things change.

And this woman must be appropriately compelled, because after looking Beth over nice and slow, she uncocks the sawed-off’s hammer. Doesn’t lower the gun much, though, which Beth supposed is fair enough. 

“I’m Daisy,” the woman says, then tilts her head sideways to indicate her daughter. “This here’s Jude, but you already knew that.”

Beth smiles tentatively, careful not to show too much teeth. These days, bared teeth are usually and rightfully interpreted as a display of aggression.

“I’m Beth, and that there’s Daryl.” Beth curls her fingers around the crook of Daryl’s elbow and applies light pressure, trying to coax him into lowering his crossbow a hair. It doesn’t really work. “But you already knew that.”

“You two with a bigger group?” Daisy asks, and Beth hears the implicit question behind the explicit query. _Will I have to shoot you after all before you can scamper off and come back with reinforcements?_

“Are _you_?” Beth retorts, because fair’s fair.

“Nah,” says Daisy, and the hollow quality to her voice is genuine. There’s real grief in it. 

So Beth says, “We were,” even though it makes Daryl grumble at her. “Got broken up, though. Scattered all over the county, I guess. We’ve been lookin’ for our family, but we haven’t had any luck so far.” _So far._ It’s an important distinction.

Because, here’s the thing. No matter how deep into depression Beth sinks, she’s not gonna give up on her family until she sees their unbreathing bodies laid out in front of her. Maybe not even then.

“Family, huh?” Then, rather doubtfully, “You two siblings?”

Daryl snorts, and Beth’s mouth curves. “No,” she says. “We ain’t blood.” Not in the biological sense, anyway.

“Married?”

Daryl makes another noise, a noise like he swallowed a chicken bone, and _Beth_ near about swallows her tongue.

“Uh, no,” Beth says when Daryl refuses to help her out. “No, it ain’t like that.” Not that she’d mind much if it _were_. “We’re friends.” Best friends, even. Beth thinks that getting drunk on moonshine and burning down a building together has cemented that.

“Friends, huh?” Daisy says speculatively, and again, Beth can hear the implication. Suspects that Daisy would ask whether or not Beth and Daryl were ‘ _special_ friends’ if not for her daughter’s presence.

Beth dislikes the implication, not because she’s repulsed by the idea of being in a physical relationship with Daryl, but because she’s viscerally offended by the notion that he would ever even _think_ about hurting her that way. Not Daryl. _Never_ Daryl.

“Yeah,” Beth grinds out. She touches the inside of Daryl’s forearm, not to hold him back or urge his crossbow down, but to ground herself. To stop _herself_ from lashing out. “ _Friends_.”

“They act like they’re married,” Jude interjects, treating Beth and Daryl to a measuring look not unlike her mother’s. “They talk to each other just like you and Daddy used to do.”

Oh. Well. That’s…something.

“Jude,” Daisy says, in the tones of a parent who has had enough. “Go to your room.”

“But—”

“Don’t you make me repeat myself.”

Judith’s face crumples, and while she does as she’s told, she also makes it clear that she’s doing it under protest. She turns on her heel and storms off through the living room and down the back hallway, yanking a door on the left open and slamming it shut behind her with a resounding clap. Daisy presses her eyes shut for a second before opening them again with a sigh.

But then she points the sawed-off’s barrel at the tiled floor and eases back a couple of steps. Presses up against the kitchen cabinets and nods for Beth and Daryl to precede her into the living tiny room.

“Y’all wanna have a seat?”

Daryl looks at Beth over his shoulder, and she gives a little nod. They shuffle forward, Daryl keeping his body between Beth’s and Daisy’s the whole time, and then settle onto the sagging tartan sofa. It’s got three cushions, and they could leave one open between them, but Daryl sits down right next to Beth, knee pressing into her thigh. Beth settles her forearm against his, and he doesn’t twitch away from the contact. If anything, he leans a little more of his weight against her side, warming her from hip to shoulder.

Daisy sits down in the recliner across from them and props her booted feet up on the glass-topped coffee table. She’s staring at the cozy picture Beth and Daryl make, and Beth raises her chin in silent challenge. Daisy openly rolls her eyes, but all she says is, “Lost your group, huh?”

Daryl doesn’t look inclined to do anything other than sit there and scowl, so Beth says, “Yeah. Few days ago, now. We had a nice setup at a prison, but it, uh.” Beth keeps a stranglehold on her voice. Doesn’t let it tremble, not in front of this stranger. “It—we got ambushed by another group. They blew out the fences. We had to run, or the walkers would’ve gotten us.”

Daisy crosses one ankle over the other. Cradles the sawed-off in her lap like a newborn baby. “Walkers, huh? That what you call those dead fuckers?”

Usually. Sometimes Daryl and Glenn are still inclined to call them geeks—like circus geeks, Daryl told her when he was in one of his more vocal moods. Guys hopped up on drugs who’d run around the ring biting the heads off of live chickens. It’s certainly a _vivid_ descriptor, she’ll give him that.

“Yeah,” is all Beth says.

“Clever,” says Daisy, and Beth can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic. “We just call ’em the dead. Never though to call them anything else.” 

“You asked us if we were part of a bigger group,” says Beth. “Were you? Before, I mean.” Jude mentioned a father.  

The lines to either side of Daisy’s mouth cut a little deeper into her skin. “Yeah,” she says, in that brusque way some people do when they don’t wanna show how bad they’re hurting. “You heard Jude talkin’ about her daddy. It was the three of us and his brother. Jude’s uncle.” Daisy’s fingers flex against the sawed-off’s barrel. “Now it’s the two of us.”

Beth doesn’t ask Daisy how she lost her husband and brother-in-law. Isn’t inclined to make this woman relive that ugliness any more than she already has. All she asks is, “You from around here? Were you livin’ here when it—when the outbreak happened?”  

Daisy shakes her head. “Nah. We’re from further south—were makin’ our way up north when we lost Bill and Joshua. Stopped here about three months ago and haven’t moved on since.”

“Think you’ll stay?”

“Think _you’ll_ stay?”

“Nah,” says Daryl, surprising Beth a little. If he’s still laconic around her and the rest of their family, he’s good as functionally mute around strangers. “Like Beth said, we been lookin’ for our people. Can’t do that real well if we stay in one place.”

Daisy nods, like that was the answer she was looking for, and it probably was. This area seems safe enough, as safe goes these days. It’s likely that Daisy isn’t inclined to share her territory.

“You’ll be movin’ on soon, then?” Daisy presses.

“Prob’ly tomorrow,” says Daryl. “Sooner, if we can hotwire us a car.”

Daisy drops her feet to the floor but doesn’t push up from her chair. “I’m not inclined to run you off at gunpoint,” she says. “Not just yet, anyway. Me and my daughter’ll keep to ourselves so long as you extend us the same courtesy. No need for things to get messy.”

Messy like buckshot to the brain. Right. Sure.  

Daryl doesn’t say or do anything, so Beth nods for the both of them.

There’s a beat of awkward silence—Beth’s been getting a lot of those today—but then Daisy stiffens like she’s bracing herself for something unpleasant and looks directly at Beth. “Can I talk to you for a minute? Alone?”

If Daryl clenches his jaw any harder, he’s gonna get a headache.

Beth manages a strained smile and wonders if that’s grinding teeth she’s hearing, or if she’s just imagining it. “Sorry, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Me an’ Daryl, we don’t like to split up much, ’specially not around strangers. No offense.”

“None taken,” says Daisy. “And I get where you’re comin’ from, but I gotta ask.” She pushes a sigh out of her nose, looking a little pained. “Would you be giving me that answer if Daryl wasn’t looming over your shoulder?”

Beth goes all cold, right around her middle, like somebody scooped out her stomach and replaced it with a block of ice. “What’re you implying?”

“I’m not _implying_ anythin’. I’m _asking_ if you’re not bein’ honest with me ’cause you don’t wanna upset your man over there.”

Daryl’s knuckles audibly pop. So, that’s not a good sign. “Lady, you best watch what you say to her.”

It occurs to Beth that Daryl’s probably not helping their case, here.

Daisy’s frown steepens. “Girl’s got a tongue, just like she said. She can speak for her damn self.”

The chill in Beth’s belly is spreading to the rest of her body, numbing her hands and prickling at her scalp. She wraps her fingers around Daryl’s thigh and feels his muscles jump like it’s taking every ounce of his self-control not to leap up and shoot this woman square between the eyes.  

Probably because it _is_ taking all of his self-control not to do that.  

“You’re right, I can,” says Beth, and the cold’s good for chilling the quaver out of her voice, if nothing else. “And I don’t appreciate bein’ condescended to. I’m a grown woman, Ms. Daisy, and I don’t need you to save me from my own family.”

“Family isn’t always good for you,” Daisy says, matter of fact. “Was true before, and it’s true now.”

Daryl’s crossbow creaks from the force of his grip, and, yeah. He’d know all about the ways your own family can hurt you, wouldn’t he?

“Like I said,” Beth insists. “Daryl’s my friend, and he wouldn’t hurt me. Not ever.”

She feels more than sees Daryl look at her. She can’t turn her head to look back at him, though, because she’s refusing to break eye contact with the woman across from her.

Daisy’s got blue eyes, Beth realizes, like her daughter’s. Unlike her daughter’s, they’re hard as marbles.

“Maybe you don’t _think_ he’s hurting you,” Daisy presses. “Maybe you just don’t know any better—”

Something in Beth snaps like a piece of dry tinder, and she’s on her feet before she knows what she’s doing.

She’s not the only one. Daryl’s on his feet, too. Fine tremors are running up and down his arms and quaking in his shoulders.

Daisy doesn’t stand up, but she adjusts the angle of her gun. A warning, clear as the sound of a cocked hammer.  

Beth grabs hold of her anger. Balls it up and forces it down her throat like a bitter pill.  

“I think we should go,” she tells Daisy.

Daisy inclines her head. “Think you should.”

Beth wraps her fingers around Daryl’s wrist.

“Daryl,” she says, but he just jerks out of her hold and stalks into the kitchen and out the front door. Doesn’t slam it behind him, though, because even in his rage, he knows better than to make too much noise.

Daisy watches him go, lips pursed. Yeah. Beth knows what it must look like, especially to someone who’s already inclined to believe the worst.

Well.

Fuck her anyway.

Beth gives Daisy a stiff nod goodbye because her parents raised her right. She adjusts the spread of her backpack and follows Daryl out the door.

He’s waiting for her on the porch with its flowerboxes, and as soon as she steps foot outside, he jerks his head and leads the way back to their trailer.

They lock the door behind them when they get inside, and Daryl storms down the hallway without a word spared for Beth, presumably to confirm that no one and nothing got inside while they were out. Beth shrugs off the backpack and leans against the kitchen counter, arms folded across her chest.

And she waits.

Daryl isn’t gone long, so it must be all clear. He stalks into the kitchen, not looking at Beth, and drops into a crouch to dig through his backpack.

Beth doesn’t ask him if he’s alright. He’d just hiss at her if she suggested he wasn’t.

Beth had a cat, once, sort of. His name was Tiger, and he was a big stocky tomcat with ragged ears and overlong fangs that peeked out of his mouth like a sabretooth’s. He didn’t live in the house, but in the barn, where he culled the vermin that didn’t have the sense to be scared off by the smell of cat. Tiger was half feral and hated to be touched without warning, but sometimes, if Beth was real patient and real sweet, she could coax him into arm’s reach. Sometimes, he’d climb into her lap, purr like a rusty engine, and nip her chin affectionately with his long sharp teeth.

Handling Daryl feels a little bit like that.

“She was wrong,” Beth says quietly. “That woman. She doesn’t know anythin’ about us.”

Daryl doesn’t say anything. Just keeps rifling through his backpack. So, okay. Beth should probably drop it.

She doesn’t drop it.

“I know you wouldn’t hurt me,” Beth goes on, watching Daryl carefully for any indication that he’s actually listening to her. “But d’you—do you ever wonder if—”

Beth doesn’t know why she says what she does next. Call it temporary insanity. Alcohol’s supposed to kill brain cells, right? Or maybe it just damages your neurons. Something like that. Point is, either Beth’s still feeling the effects of the moonshine, or she’s grown herself some mighty brass balls, because.

Because she opens her mouth and _actually says_ , “I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad, would it? If things were like that between us.”

Daryl freezes, hands clutched around the package of soaps. But, no, he _doesn’t_ freeze, because he’s tilting his head back and looking up at her through his greasy bangs. And Beth swallows, throat clicking painfully, because the sight of Daryl Dixon kneeling at her feet—even if he isn’t actually _kneeling at her feet_ —it’s. It’s _something_. The kind of something that makes her mouth dry out and her belly heat up.

“The fuck’re you sayin’?” Daryl growls. That’s not encouraging. Beth should shut up, should quit while she’s ahead. Probably Daryl would let her pretend that she didn’t say anything at all, if only for his own peace of mind.

She doesn’t shut up, though, because as this morning taught her, she really _doesn’t_ have the sense God gave a dead squirrel.   

“I, uh.” Beth clenches her fingers around the countertop’s plywood edge like maybe it’ll ground her. “Would it really be so bad, if. Um. If we _were_ together like that. I mean, does it. Does it gross you out that much?”

If she thought her face was on fire when she stood half naked in front of him, that’s _nothing_ compared to _this_. Her face is so hot it’s tingling, and she thinks she just might burn her capillaries right out. Just go up in literal flames, not a girl but a bonfire.

Her heart’s pounding like a rabbit’s, and Daryl—

Daryl’s setting the soaps aside and getting to his feet, unfolding from his crouch like some big predator on the hunt. His buck knife appears in his hand, and he cuts the dead squirrel loose from his belt and tosses it onto the tiny kitchen table. Folds his knife and puts it away.

Comes closer, and Beth can only stare stupidly at him like a deer in the headlights.

He stops before he’s within arm’s reach, but Beth continues to get the impression that she’s being stalked.

“That what you want?” he asks, voice wavering in a way that makes Beth feel like a terrible person. “Y’want people to think that I’m, what—that I’m fuckin’ _raping_ you in exchange for food and shelter? Huh?”

Beth’s gut churns in a way that has nothing to do with her fading hangover. “God, _no_ ,” she blurts. “No, I—I just meant, would you hate it that much if we _were_ together? Not ’cause you were makin’ me, but because I _wanted_ it?”

What is she saying? _What is she saying_? She’s as good as admitting that she’s got a stupid puppy dog crush on him, but. Why not? They’re gonna die sooner rather than later, or at least _she_ will. So _why not_?

Daryl’s shoulders snap back, spine going ramrod straight. Behind his curtain of hair, his eyes are wild.

“Girl,” he says, “you’re eighteen if you’re a goddamn _day_ —”

Oh, no. _No_. She’s not gonna let him do this. If he doesn’t want her like that, fine, she’ll back off, but if all that’s stopping him is her _age_ , then he’s got an earful coming his way.

“I’m old enough to take care of a baby that ain’t even mine,” Beth says, ruthless, and Daryl flinches like she slapped him. “I’m old enough to fire a gun and I’m old enough to put down walkers. I’m old enough to _die_ , but I ain’t old enough to _fuck_?”

There. There it is, that word: the drag of her lower lip between her teeth for the _F_ , the click of her tongue for those final hard consonants. What she wants. What she wants specifically from _him_. To be held down and fingered open and _fucked_.

Not made love to. _Fucked_.

Daryl goes very, very still. So still that Beth can’t even tell if he’s breathing. But he is. She can hear it, quiet but uneven. Ragged, like he’s been running for his life.  

“That what you want?” he says again, deadly quiet. Beth thinks she can hear the almost-soundless whisper of his feet on the kitchen tile. “You wanna get _fucked_? You want me to stick my cock in you?”

Beth’s eyes actually _flutter_ like they want to slam shut. She can imagine it, viscerally. His dick. How it would feel, dragging heavy inside her, stroking her nerve endings raw. How his callused fingers would strum her swollen clit and make her come all over his cock. How wet she’d get for him. How wet she already _is_. God. _God_.

She forces her eyes wide open and clear. Looks him full in the face when she rasps, “Yeah. That’s what I want.”

She doesn’t see him move, but there’s a big warm hand at the small of her back and long fingers wrapped around her ponytail and he’s tugging her head back and her sunglasses are sliding off her skull to clatter on the countertop behind her. There’s his flat stomach and his strong thighs and all she sees and smells is _him_.

Beth holds very still. Looks him in his face. Looks at his heavy eye bags and crow’s feet and the gray in his ungroomed scruff. Yeah, he’s older than her. No, she doesn’t much care. Thinks she might even like it.

The hand wrapped around her ponytail gives a gentle squeeze, and Beth’s scalp tingles. She makes a breathless noise, high and a little desperate, and Daryl inhales roughly and rocks his hips against her stomach. He’s not hard yet, but he’s well on his way to it. Beth can feel him stirring against her belly.

“ _Girl_ ,” he says, and her toes curl in her boots. “You don’t even know what the _fuck_ you’re doin’, d’you?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but Beth answers it anyway. “I know enough,” she says, shaky but defiant.

He’s trying to scare her, but it won’t work, or at least, it won’t work in the way he wants it to. She’s not certain of a lot of things, but she’s certain that Daryl would never do anything to hurt her. Certain that he’d never touch her unless she explicitly _wanted_ it.

There are lots of things she wants, but she’ll take him, like this, pinning her to the kitchen counter in an abandoned trailer. She twists her fingers in his greasy hair, bows her back, rises onto her curling toes. Breathes across his mouth, not quite a kiss. Calls his _fucking_ bluff.

Daryl shudders. His lips part where they hover over hers, breath gusting along her mouth. That breath is humid and stale and smells a little bit like the granola bar he had for breakfast, but Beth doesn’t even care. This isn’t perfect, this isn’t a _damn romance novel_ , but it’s more than she’d ever thought she’d get. She’ll take it for what it is.

And she does. Take it. She rolls her hips against his, against his ridged hipbones and stiff dick, and that’s when he pulls back. That’s when he leaves her cold. He’s looking at her like _she’s_ hunting _him_ , and maybe she is. Her fingers curve around nothing, imagining the feel of him in her hands.  

She reaches for him, but he retreats one step, then another. Practically _flees_ down the hallway, and when Beth turns to watch him go, it’s to the sight of him locking himself in the bathroom. She strains her ears and hears water running.

She clenches her fingers against her buzzing stomach. Sinks slowly to her haunches. Runs her tongue over her lips and swears she can still taste the ghost of his breath.  

All she can think is, _God. Jesus God. Maggie’s gonna kick my ass._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're nearly there, folks. Thanks for reading ❤️


	6. dear diary, my teen angst bullshit has a body count

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth Greene and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stranger danger.

The pounding on the door snaps her out of it.

Beth lifts her head off her knees, palming the handle of her knife as automatically as breathing. The knocking sounded deliberate, so she doubts it was just some walker slamming itself indiscriminately against the door, drawn to the trailer by the smell of living flesh. Which isn’t much of a relief, actually: Beth can handle a lone walker. It’s people you’ve got to be wary of, even if Beth still believes that the good outnumber the bad.

There’s another round of pounding, coming in three successive knocks. Yeah. Definitely a person.

Beth unfolds her body and gets to her feet, fingers still firmly hooked around her knife’s handle as she goes to the window and peers outside. She startles a little at what she sees. At _who_ she sees.

It’s Daisy, hip cocked, hands wrapped securely around her sawed-off. She spots Beth in the window and nods. Jude isn’t with her.

Wary but not quite as anxious as she was a second ago, Beth goes to unlock the door. She opens it wide enough to get a good look at Daisy’s face, but not so wide that she couldn’t slam it shut at a moment’s notice.

“Afternoon, Ms. Daisy,” Beth says, cautious but polite. Now that the first flush of her defensive anger has had time to fade, she’s beginning to feel bad about the way things ended back at Daisy and Jude’s place.

But unlike Beth, Daisy doesn’t seem inclined to waste time on niceties. “You eat yet today?”

_Uh. What?_

“I’m…sorry?” Beth tries.

“Said, have you eaten yet?” Daisy rocks back on her heels and gives Beth a critical onceover. “You’re real damn skinny, and I’m goin’ by the standards set by a motherfucking apocalypse. Your man been feeding you or what?”

Despite her resolution to keep things civil this time around, Beth bristles a little. “I ain’t some _pet_ —and Daryl’s been doin’ his best to keep us both fed. You saw his bow. He’s a damn fine hunter.” The best, even.

“That right? Then what’s the last meal your ‘damn fine hunter’ fed you?”  

Uh. Well. Moonshine probably doesn’t count. The snake _barely_ counts, given that Beth threw most of it up this morning, but, okay, fine. Whatever. “Um. Mud snake.”

The hard set of Daisy’s mouth softens a little. “Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Don’t got any mud snake, but we got jelly and some bread that isn’t too moldy back at the trailer. You wanna swing by for lunch?”

Now that Daisy’s mentioned food, Beth can’t help but abruptly notice that her stomach’s feeling a little empty, and that the low-lying nausea has been in large part replaced with the hollow ache of hunger. She presses one hand to her stomach, hoping that it doesn’t choose now to rumble and embarrass her in front of a possibly hostile stranger.

“Thought you wanted us to leave you be.”

Daisy doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t scowl, either. “Guess I feel bad about upsetting you earlier. Figured I’d make it up to you with a free meal.”

Beth’s temper wants to flare up again, but honestly, she gets where Daisy was coming from. If she saw a young woman traveling alone with a rough-looking guy like Daryl, well. She’d probably assume the worst, too.

Straightening her shoulders and narrowing her eyes, Beth asks, “Does this invitation extend to Daryl, too?”

Daisy shrugs loosely. “If he wants.”

Right. Okay. Beth nods. “I’ll go get him.”

Leaving the door hanging open makes Beth anxious, but Daisy’s there and she’s got a shotgun and probably at least one knife, so Beth heads down the hall and stops in front of the closed bathroom door. The water’s still running.

Beth’s cheeks flare hot, and she has to clear her throat before calling out to him.  

“Daryl?”

Nothing.

So it’s gonna be like _that_ , huh?

Well, fine. She’ll give it one more try, and then she’s out of here. “Daryl? Daisy’s here. She wants to invite us to lunch.”

The sound of running water gets louder, like he turned the faucet to full blast just to drown her out.

Beth just about _snarls_. “ _Fine_! Stay in there an’ _pout_ , ya stubborn old _jackass_.”  

Beth storms over to where Daisy’s waiting for her, and the look on the older woman’s face says it all. “Trouble in paradise?”

Beth glares sidelong at Daryl’s stupid dead squirrel where it’s decomposing slowly on the kitchen table. She has half a mind to kick in the bathroom door and hurl it at Daryl’s _head_.

“Told you we ain’t a couple.”

Daisy’s look turns shrewd. “But you want to be?”

Flushing anew, Beth gives a jerk of her head that could be interpreted as agreement or dismissal. Turning, she stoops to dig through the backpack and comes up triumphant with the jar of peanut butter. Showing it to Daisy, she says, “For the sandwiches.”

Daisy purses her lips, but at least she doesn’t comment on Beth’s clumsy rerouting of the subject.

Beth waffles over whether to leave the door locked or unlocked, and finally settles on unlocked. Walkers can’t work doorknobs, and Daryl can hold his own against the living just fine.

The walk to Daisy’s trailer is brisk, tense, and silent. Beth forgot her shades in the kitchen, but her eyeballs aren’t throbbing real bad anymore, and some thin clouds have scudded in to soften the sharp noontime sunlight.

Inside Daisy’s trailer, Beth does a quick sweep with her eyes and says, “Jude still in her room?”

“Yeah.” Daisy sets her gun down in one of the ladder-backed kitchen chairs and rubs her thumb between her eyes. “Girl could win Olympic gold for epic pouting.”

“I dunno about that,” says Beth. “I know a kid who can sulk with the best of them. Think he could give Jude a run for her money.”  

 _Know_ , she said. Not _knew_.

But she can’t think about Carl right now, not if she doesn’t want to burst into tears in front of a stranger, so Beth blinks hard a couple of times and sits down in the chair opposite Daisy’s gun, setting her jar of peanut butter down on the laminate tabletop. Mostly she brought it along because PB&J sandwiches aren’t any good without the PB, but she’d be lying if she said that sharing their food with strangers just to annoy Daryl wasn’t an attractive bonus.

Daisy doesn’t say anything, just snags the jar of peanut butter on her way to the kitchen counter, and Beth twists around in her chair to watch her work. Seeing Daisy smear peanut butter and jelly across thin slabs of probably stale bread reminds Beth irresistibly of her own mother, of swinging her feet over the edge of a kitchen chair while Annette assembled sandwiches for her children to take to school. Beth blinks rapidly, trying to dispel the burn in her eyes, then drops her head with a muted groan when pain spears through her skull.

Guess her headache wasn’t as cured as she thought it was. Maybe the Tylenol’s wearing off already.

Ceramic clinks on the laminate, and Beth raises her head. Daisy setting the plates down on the table, and she’s frowning at Beth with something not unlike concern.

“You okay?”

Beth summons a weak smile. “Yeah, I’m…I’m good. Got a bit of a headache, s’all.”

“We got some prescription-strength Motrin in the medicine cabinet. You want any?”

The offer of medicine throws Beth more than Daisy’s earlier offer of free food. It’s one thing to share your lunch with a stranger, because just about anyone can grow new food. Drugs are something else, though. Most people weren’t pharmacists or chemists before the world went to shit, and it takes a specialized skillset to synthesize new medicine.

“No, thanks,” Beth says slowly. Cautiously. “I already took some Tylenol a couple of hours ago. Think it’s too soon to take anythin’ else.”

“No? Alright. No skin off my nose.” Daisy throws herself down into the next to her gun and tugs her plate closer. “Offer’s still open if you change your mind, though. Can’t go up against those dead fuckers with your head splitting itself in half.”

Beth doesn’t think that she _will_ be changing her mind, is the thing. Still, she says, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Beth was right about the bread: it’s a little stale, especially around the edges, but it’s softer towards the middle, and the peanut butter and jelly soften up the rest. Even with the stale crust, it’s the best thing Beth’s tasted in days. She appreciates everything Daryl does to keep them both alive, but it’s nice to eat something that didn’t used to blink.

Beth doesn’t think to ask the question until after she’s already eaten half of the sandwich. “You ain’t gonna call Jude out for lunch?”

“Nah. She’d just ignore me if I did, and the food would just go to waste. Better to let her come out when she’s good and ready.”

Beth guesses that Daisy _would_ know her daughter best, so she doesn’t say anything. Just nods and bends her head to finish her sandwich.

“You and Daryl aren’t the first people she’s found wandering around out there, y’know.”

Beth looks up from her sandwich, caught mid-chew. Swallowing in a hurry, she says, “We ain’t?”

“Nah. Girl sneaks out a lot, and she’s always bringing back strays. No offense.”

“None taken.” She guesses. “What, um. What happened to them? To the people she brought back? They move on?”

It’s funny, now that Beth actually thinks about it. Sure, there aren’t as many people as there used to be, but surely a place as nice as this—a place with shelter and food and little in the way of roaming walkers—surely there ought to be more people holed up around here than just Daisy and Jude. It’s possible that Beth just hasn’t noticed them yet—people don’t spend a lot of time out doors unless they absolutely have to, and it could be that the sight of Daryl with his bow scared them into hiding—but it’s just. Funny.

Daisy doesn’t answer Beth’s question in a hurry, taking her sweet time about finishing her sandwich. “Yeah. None of ’em stuck around long.”

Beth’s eyes sweep across the sawed-off, propped upright against its chair’s laddered back, barrel pointing at the ceiling. Her food feels heavy in her stomach, like she swallowed rocks instead of bread.

“Oh,” is all Beth says.

“You done?” Daisy nods at Beth’s cleared plate, and Beth nods automatically back, still caught up in her approaching conclusion. Daisy goes to pick up Beth’s plate, and Beth glances her fingers off of Daisy’s wrist before tucking them awkwardly against her chest.

Daisy’s skin was cold to the touch, but some people are just like that. Maybe she’s got low blood pressure or something.

“You don’t have to—”

“I got it. You’re the guest, here.”  

Beth tries not to be too obvious about eyeing Daisy’s sawed-off. “Guess I am.”

Beth lets Daisy take her cleared plate, watching her stack it on top of her own. Daisy moves out Beth’s line of sight, presumably heading towards the sink, and she doesn’t take her gun with her.

Beth’s heartbeat pounds in her ears. Scooting towards the lip of her seat, she stretches out her fingers with the intent of wrapping them around Daisy’s abandoned gun.

The sound of shattering ceramic grates at Beth’s ears, and fingers snarl in her hair and scrape hot painful lines across her scalp, jerking her up and out of her seat. The chair wobbles over and lands on its side with a crash Beth can feel in her teeth, and her vision blurs as she’s flung up against a hard, uneven surface.

The counter. Daisy threw her against the counter, and she’s got a Bowie knife in her right hand.

Back and hips barking with pain, breath frozen in her chest, all Beth can think to say is, “Jude’s not in her room, is she?”

“Sent her out,” Daisy says shortly, before lashing out and grabbing Beth by the collar of her oversized shirt. The shirt rips a seam, and Beth’s tailbone smacks into the floor, body bored down by Daisy’s heavier weight.

The pain’s nearly debilitating, but Beth’s endured worse, _inflicted_ worse on herself when she opened her wrist up with a glass shard. She manages to get a hand up and wrapped around Daisy’s wrist, squeezing with the hope that the pressure’ll cause Daisy’s fist to reflexively open and drop the knife. It doesn’t, and the knife’s cutting edge glances off Beth’s cheek, parting the skin and releasing a hot trickle of blood.

Beth wants to tell Daisy that she doesn’t have to do this, but she’d be stupid to even try, because Daisy is clearly convinced that she _does_ have to do this. In her mind, she’s doing what’s right. She’s protecting her home. Her daughter.

Beth’s just lucky, she guesses, that Daisy used the gun as a feint instead of her primary weapon. Otherwise, Beth would already be dead, or well on her way to it.

Not that holding Daisy and her knife off is easy, because it’s not. It’s a mad, desperate scramble, Beth straining to keep her arms up and between their bodies, one hand on Daisy’s wrist and the other pressing into her face, feeling Daisy’s breath blast hotly across her forehead. It’s nothing like struggling to hold off a walker, because walkers are just stupid animal instinct. They can’t _think_. They can’t strategize.

If Beth could just get to her own knife—if she didn’t have to use both hands to hold Daisy off—then maybe she’d stand a chance at survival. But could she actually do it? Could she kill a living person, even if that person already tried to kill _her_? She shot at the Governor and his men, but that was from a distance. That was almost impersonal. It doesn’t get much more _personal_  than sinking your knife deep into the warmth of a living person’s gut and watching the light fade from their eyes from up close.

Spit’s trailing from the corners of Daisy’s open mouth, and she’s starting to look more like a walker than a person, after all. Beth grinds her palm harder against Daisy’s cheekbone, thumb coming up to press against her eyeball. She pushes down hard, harder, wondering how much force it’ll take to pop that eyeball right out of Daisy’s socket. To turn it into gory jelly.

She never finds out. Doesn’t have to make a call on killing Daisy or letting her live. She doesn’t have to, because Daisy forgot to lock the trailer’s front door.

That door crashes open and bounces off the wall, and Daisy twists to face the source of the noise on reflex, fingers spasming around her knife’s handle.

Beth can’t see much of what’s going on, but she can hear, barely, over the roaring in her ears. There’s a familiar twang, and then an awful wet sound like a grape being crushed in somebody’s fist. Daisy’s body jerks like it’s been electrocuted, then slumps to one side, still half in Beth’s lap. Dead weight.

A scream catches in Beth’s throat but never makes it all the way out.

There’s a bolt lodged in Daisy’s eye. It had to have torn clean through her brain.

Beth struggles to push Daisy’s body off of her, but somebody else does it for her, and that same somebody’s tucking both hands under Beth’s arms to lift her to her feet. Beth thrashes to get free on pure instinct only to go limp when she hears Daryl’s voice.   

“It’s alright, girl, it’s alright. You did fine. You did jus’ fine.”

“Didn’t,” Beth chokes out, clutching Daryl around his neck, clinging tight enough to strangle him. She _didn’t_ do fine. Couldn’t make the kill. Daryl’s gonna be pissed—he’s gonna think she’s some pathetic little _pussy_ , some _dumb college bitch_ —

Daryl’s arms fold around Beth like she’s shaking because she’s cold and not because she’s coming down from an adrenaline rush, like she needs to be warmed with someone else’s body heat.

“Sure, you did,” he says, mouth tucked against her ear, beard scratching the bolt of her jaw. “You’re alive, ain’t ya? Means you did fine. C’mon, quit shakin’. Ain’t gonna let nobody hurt you. I got you, Beth, I got you.”

He’s talking to her a little like he did this morning, when he folded her over the toilet and held her hair out of the way. Her stomach heaves, and she thinks she might just vomit again. Might puke all down Daryl’s front, and she oughta let him go, but she can’t. Doesn’t. She buries her face in the hollow of his throat where the smell of his sweat is strongest.

 _I got you_.

Beth turns her face away from Daryl’s throat, rolling her cheek against his shoulder. She stares out the open doorway and jolts when she sees something moving.

Sees _someone_ moving.

Jude.

It’s Jude, and she’s not even looking at Beth or Daryl. No, her eyes are all for her mother’s dead body.

Beth struggles out of Daryl’s arms, and he turns with her, tries to pull her back.

“ _Daryl_ ,” she says. “Daryl, look—”

Beth takes a wobbly step forward, towards Jude, but Daryl’s arms snag around her waist and hold her back.

Jude meets Beth’s eyes, and Beth holds out her hands, imploring. Silently begging Jude to let her explain, as if something like this could _ever_ be explained.

Jude’s eyes shutter. She whirls around, scrambling over the side of the porch and taking off into the trees like a spooked fawn. Beth lurches after her, but Daryl drags her back in and pins her against his chest.

“We can’t, Beth. She’s the one who led us here.”

Beth digs her nails deep into his wrists, maybe even deep enough to draw blood. He doesn’t even twitch. “But—”

“No. Y’hear me? _No_.”

Tears spill out of Beth’s eyes, dripping down her jaw and onto her lips. She slumps, hanging limp as a ragdoll in Daryl’s arms, and he curls his body around hers. Tucks his face into the crook of her neck and moves his warm lips against her cold skin.

 _I got you_ , he keeps saying. Maybe. Could be that Beth’s just hearing things. _I got you, girl, I got you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I know. Still no smut. If it's any consolation, Chapter 7's shaping up to be nothing _but_ smut. Filthy, vile smut. 
> 
> Thanks for reading ❤️


	7. he can be taught

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl nearly cockblocks himself with his own self-worth issues, and Beth wonders, WWMD?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE JUST TAKE IT I'M TIRED OF LOOKING AT IT.

Beth sloughs off her pilfered clothing and washes her hair in the sink.

The shampoo they found’s got one of those cloying floral scents that Beth hates, and she hates it even more when it plugs up her nose and exacerbates her headache, but she hasn’t washed her hair since before the prison fell, and her scalp was starting to itch, covered as it was with road gunk and dry flakes of dead skin.

 _Cloying shampoo’s better than no shampoo at all_ , she decides as she ducks her head beneath the faucet to rinse clumps of lather out of her hair, careful not to soak the bandage on her cheek.

She hadn’t wanted to waste their first aid kit’s precious supplies on a shallow cut like this one, but Daryl insisted—and by ‘insisted,’ Beth means that he held her face still and applied bubbling hydrogen peroxide to her cut before taping it over with a Mickey Mouse bandaid.

“Can’t risk infection,” he said when she grumbled at him.

Beth guesses that he’s right. Guesses that they can’t.

Beth squeezes the excess moisture out of her hair before flipping it over her shoulder and lifting her head. Looks herself over in the pitted mirror that fronts the medicine cabinet. Aside from the bandaid on her cheek, she’s got fresh bruises coming up mottled and purple along her jawline. She doesn’t have to twist around to confirm that her backside’s in a similar state.

Daisy really did a number on her—but then Daryl put a bolt through Daisy’s eye, so Beth figures they’re even now.

She has to swallow a hysterical bubble of laughter when she thinks about it. When she thinks about Daisy dying right on top of her.  

They looted her stuff. Picked her trailer clean of whatever they needed, although Beth refused to take Daisy’s clothes. Took her gun and her ammo and her knife. Daryl kept the knife, but Beth’s the one who carried the gun back to their trailer. It’s hers now.

She should probably field strip it. It might help settle her thoughts a little, to do something by rote.

There’s a pounding on the front door, and Beth doesn’t even startle when she hears it. Just goes to answer it in her underthings, hair dripping rivulets of water down the curve of her back, lengthening shadows striping across her bare arms and legs.

Daryl insisted that she lock the door after him, too.

Beth checks that it’s him through the window before opening the door and stepping back to make room. He’s got a new backpack slung over one arm, and it looks stuffed to bursting.

He must’ve gone scavenging for supplies while he was out tracking Jude.

He drops the backpack with a muted thud. Beth looks a question at him and is unsurprised when he shakes his head.

“Found some tracks goin’ south,” he says. “Looked about the right size. She’s gotta be long gone, though, if they’re hers.”

Beth hugs her arms to her chest—not because she’s cold, even though she should be, but because she needs the illusion of security.

Daryl’s eyes glitter at her from behind his bangs. He works his mouth soundlessly for a couple of seconds, then says, “…Y’know we couldn’t keep her even if we found her, right?”

Beth’s fingernails bite into her palms. They’re ragged. Getting too long. She needs to clip them. 

She doesn’t need Daryl to tell her as much, is the thing. They’ll never know Jude’s part in all this for sure. Maybe she _didn’t_ know what her mom was doing.

But maybe she did.

Daryl’s frowning, and Beth realizes that she hasn’t said anything to him since he got back inside.

It’s possible that she hasn’t said anything to him since he held her back from going after Jude.

Funny. Usually _she’s_ the one who has to coax _him_ into talking.

Hugging her arms tighter to her middle, Beth says, “Yeah. I know.” 

Daryl does that thing where he sticks his chest out a little and shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Found some clothes while I was out,” he says. “Think they might fit okay.”

“Oh,” Beth says, blinking down at the stuffed backpack. “Okay. Thanks.”

Daryl’s frown just gets steeper. His fingers twitch at his sides, strumming the air.

Beth flexes her bare toes, thinking that she should probably get dressed. The water dripping off the ends of her hair has started to soak her waistband.

She says, “You got any idea why she came back for me? Why didn’t she just do us both the first time around?"

“…Prob’ly wanted to get you alone. Don’t think she wanted to take us both on at once.”

Yeah. That’s what Beth thought. But she has to wonder—what would Daisy have done had Daryl agreed to come along for lunch? Would she have waited and tried again, or would she have let them go?

Something else they’ll never know.

“Yeah,” says Beth. “I figured as much.”

Daryl squints at her. “Why you askin’ me, then?”

Looking at him like it should be obvious, Beth says, “’Cause you’re smarter than me.”

Daryl’s squinty look gets pissy, like he thinks she’s making fun of him.

A knife of exasperation pierces Beth’s apathy. “You _are_. You’re a genius, Daryl.”

The tips of Daryl’s ears flush red. He hunches his shoulders and mumbles, “Some genius, lettin’ you wander off alone with that crazy bitch.”

Usually Beth would scold him for calling a woman a bitch, but she’s been having some uncharitable thoughts about Daisy, herself. “Yeah, but you came after me.”

And Daryl just. _Looks_ at her. There’s a weight to that look, and he doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to.

He’ll always come after her.

Beth looks away first, wet hair flopping over her shoulders and sticking to her cheeks. She’s finally starting to feel the cold, and it’s making her shiver.

“I’m goin’ to bed,” she says. It’s still pretty early, but she wants nothing more than to get horizontal and pass the hell out. Anyway, it’s not like anyone’s running on a nine-to-five schedule these days.

“Y’shouldn’t go to bed with wet hair.”

Beth meets his eyes again just to give him a sardonic look. “You find any towels while you were out? A blow dryer, maybe?”

Daryl narrows his eyes at her, but he shakes his head.

“Looks like I’m goin’ to bed with wet hair, then. S’not like it’s gonna kill me.”

Daryl flinches a little when Beth says ‘kill me,’ and seeing it makes her chest go all tight like she’s about to cry. She doesn’t, though. Thinks her well of tears might be all dried out.

Instead of crying, she stretches up onto her toes and kisses his scruffy cheek.

Falling back onto the flats of her feet, she looks him in the face and asks, “You comin’ to bed?”

Daryl hesitates.

Nods.

Beth scoops up the new backpack and leads the way to the bedroom. Drops it off by the doorway and crawls into bed, folding back the covers and watching Daryl expectantly as he sets his stuff down on the dresser and shrugs out of his vest. He hesitates again, briefly, before unlacing his boots and kicking them off.

He gets in bed, lying down on his side facing her, and she copies him. Drags the blankets up around her chin.

Daryl nailed some spare sheets he found in the linen closet to the wall above the window so nobody could come up and peer in on them during the night, and the sunlight filters in all soft and blurry. Dreamy, almost.

Daryl’s got one fist curled loosely against the mattress, and Beth folds her palm over his knuckles. Slots her fingers through his. Contemplates singing them both to sleep. Doesn’t.

Instead, she says, “I’m sorry.”

Daryl stirs. “What the hell for?”

“For upsettin’ you earlier. For pushin’ you.”

Daryl’s hand tenses, but he doesn’t slide it out from under Beth’s, and that gives her the courage she needs to go on.

“But I’m not sorry for likin’ you. Or wantin’ you.” 

Daryl’s not looking at her. “Beth—”

“No, you listen.” Beth sits up, blankets pooling around her waist, and Daryl rolls onto his back to watch her. Brings his hand to his mouth and bites his thumbnail.

“I like you,” Beth tells him, and it feels like relief. Feels like peeling a bandaid off an old wound. “An’ you don’t get a say in whether I do or don’t. Y’hear me? You get a say in whether I do anythin’ about it, but you don’t get to tell me how to feel. You _don’t_.”

She’s lost just about everything—her father, her sister, every member of her family except for Daryl—but she still has her feelings. _Her_ feelings. They belong to her, and she gets decide what she does with them.

She almost _died_ today. Hell if she’s gonna waste what’s left of her life lying about how she feels. She doesn't have the _time_ for that shit. 

Daryl fastens his teeth around a knuckle, and Beth wants to drag his hand away from his mouth, to soothe that bite with a kiss. “I’m fucked up, Beth. I can’t— _fuck_. I can’t give you what you need.”

“That’s alright. I’m kinda fucked up too, these days. And I think you _could_ give me what I needed. If you wanted to.”

Daryl’s mouth stills against his knuckles. Beth doesn’t think it’s the sunset that’s turning his cheeks red. 

Feeling a bit like she just drained a fresh jar of moonshine, Beth says, “ _Do_ you want to?”

Daryl starts chewing on his thumbnail again. Folding her fingers over his, Beth pulls his hand away from his mouth.

“I’m not—I’m not sayin’ you have to do anythin’ about it.” She rubs her thumb across his scabbed knuckles, as much to calm herself as to soothe him. “But, just. Hypothetically. If you could—if nothin’ was stoppin’ you, not even your own damn orneriness—”

Daryl grumbles a little at that, but Beth soldiers on.

“If nothin’ was stoppin’ you, an’ you thought that you _could_ give me what I need—would you?”

Beth’s already braced herself for rejection, so when Daryl nods haltingly, not meeting her eyes like looking at her head on will turn him to stone, she can’t process it at first.

But then she does.

 _Oh_ , Beth thinks.

Her hands are shaking, and Daryl can probably feel it, but her voice comes out strong when she says, “Do you want to kiss me?”

Daryl sucks his bottom lip between his teeth and gnaws on it, but his eyes flicker to Beth’s mouth like he’d rather bite _her_. He looks away real quick, but Beth saw him do it.

Beth squeezes his fingers. “Can _I_ kiss _you_?”

Daryl’s hand spasms under hers.

Alright. Okay.

It’s time to ask herself WWMD.

_What would Maggie do?_

Maggie would fucking _go for it_ , is what Maggie would do. 

Beth lets her mouth go all loose and soft. Rolls her tongue across her lower lip. Looks at Daryl from under her fanned lashes and whispers, “ _Please_?”

She probably looks stupid. Probably looks like a little girl doing a bad Marilyn Monroe impersonation at her school’s talent show. It’s not gonna work. It’s not—

“Fuckin’ _hell_.”

It works.

Daryl sits up so fast that Beth has to scramble out of the way to avoid a skull-to-skull collision. He scoots back against the headboard and tugs on their joined hands, and Beth half falls into his chest. The blankets twist around her legs like a tangle of grasping hands, and Beth fights to kick them off, swearing under her breath.

She stops swearing in a hurry when Daryl snarls his fingers in the clump of damp hair at the nape of her neck and drags her mouth down to his. And then she wants to swear again for a completely different reason.

Sweet Jesus, the inside of his mouth is like a goddamn _furnace_.

Beth sinks into that hot mouth like she’s sinking into quicksand, slow and inexorable. She plasters herself to his chest and soaks up even more of that heat, wriggling farther into his lap and luxuriating in the scrape of rough denim on her bare skin. An itch has started up between her legs, and it’s blooming slowly into a thrumming pressure like a second heartbeat, and she needs more friction _yesterday_. Not on her inner thighs—although that’s nice, too—but in her swelling cunt.

Daryl’s kiss gets deeper, sloppier, mouth glancing off the dip of Beth’s chin before latching back onto hers. It’s unpracticed, Beth realizes. Almost clumsy. Has it been a while since he’s done this? Did he ever do it much at all? Beth doesn’t remember him ever hooking up with anyone at the prison. Does it make her special, that he wants to do this with _her_ when he never cared to do it much with anyone else?

She likes the idea of it. Of being special. Of being the first thing Daryl’s allowed himself to _want_ and not just need.

 _Beth_ needs this, though. It might not be a very healthy coping mechanism, but it’s what she’s got. She needs to forget her scattered family and those lost children. Needs to forget that walker kid and Carl and Judith and Jude. She needs Daryl’s beard scratching at her chin and his fingers sweeping down her spine to clutch at her ass and _squeeze_.

So. Looks like she was right: he _is_ fixated on her butt.

The lips on Beth’s face are getting all slick and swollen like the lips between her legs, and she thinks they just might bust open and bleed if she doesn’t give herself a break. She unseals their mouths and blinks at him in the murky gray light.

When did the sun set?

Daryl blinks muzzily back at her, punch drunk, lips red and puffy and so fucking wet. He could’ve been eating her out this whole time, looking like that.

Just thinking about it makes her cunt throb like he’s already got his mouth wrapped around her clit. No one’s ever done that for her. Would he?

Beth thinks that he just might.

She sits up on her knees, putting her chest level with his face, and twists her sports bra off. His hands immediately surrender her ass to grope at her tits and pulp them between his fingers, mouth wrapping around one nipple and sucking it into his mouth. Her tit’s small enough that she thinks he could fit the whole thing in his mouth if he wanted to, and he seems inclined to try.

Beth huffs out a whine, hips riding the air. She tucks her fingers beneath her waistband, and Daryl must have felt her move, because he pulls off her tit with a scrape of sharp teeth and lifts his head to look at her.

“Uh.” Beth fiddles with the worn elastic. “Can I—can I take these off?”

Looking at her like he can’t quite believe she’s real, Daryl nods.

“Okay,” Beth says, and scoots backwards out of his lap. She sits back and lifts her ass off the mattress, wiggling out of her sticky panties and tossing them over her shoulder without much care for where they land. Daryl surprises her by tearing at his shirt’s buttons and shrugging it off, and when he crawls after her on his hands and knees, the muscles in his shoulders bunch and coil.

Beth lets her legs go slack, lets him shoulder between her thighs. His thumb brushes her thrumming clit, making her toes curl, and he dips his longest finger into the cleft of her body to spread her wet around. Slides another finger in alongside the first and peels her sticky pussy lips apart. She’s getting wetter just from this, just from those exploratory little touches. She’s gotta be dripping all over his knuckles by now.

She watches him from under eyelids that have gone all heavy and drowsy. Watches him part his lips and inhale the musky wet smell of her. Watches him slide a finger deep into her cunt and split her open like a piece of overripe fruit. She watches him until the elbows she’s planted in the sagging mattress can’t hold her up anymore, and then she flops onto her back and pants towards the ceiling.

She’s not looking at him now, but she can hear him moving around, and the squealing mattress sinks under his weight as he stretches out on his belly. His shaggy hair tickles the insides of her thighs, breath blasting hot and humid across her cunt, and she knows what’s coming. She knows what he’s gonna do to her, and that knowledge settles low in her abdomen like an impending orgasm.

Her pubic hair’s overgrown and wild, but Daryl seems to like it that way, combing his fingers through it and rubbing his cheek against her bush. Beth hooks her legs over his shoulders, digs her heels into his spine, and rests her hands lightly against the crown of his head. She wants to snarl her fingers in his hair and drag his mouth onto her clit, but she doesn’t. She waits.

Daryl grinds his thumb against her clit, digs in hard enough that she can feel the pad of it press into her pubic bone. His beard scratches her pussy lips. He shifts his thumb to one side, wraps his mouth around her clit, and _sucks_.

“Jesus _Christ_.”

Okay. So maybe she stretched the truth a little when she said that she rarely took the Lord’s name in vain. In her defense, Daryl’s giving her mighty good reason to.

Daryl makes a guttural noise like _she’s_ the one who put her mouth on _him_ , eating her pussy like it’s actually food and he’s hungry, starving. Like he’s a wolf with its muzzle planted deep in the steaming gut of some dead prey animal. Like his kiss, there’s no finesse to this, and Beth knows that when she _does_ come, it’s gonna _hurt_.

His teeth clip her clit, and she tries to squirm farther down the bed and away from his mouth, not because she doesn’t want him to keep at it, but because she needs a break, just for a second—but he just grabs two handfuls of her ass and drags her back in, going in so deep it’s a wonder he can even _breathe_ down there, and Beth doesn’t try to get away again. And the longer he’s at it, the better he gets, because this is Daryl goddamn Dixon, and he _is_ smart, and he _fucking pays_ _attention_.

He stiffens his tongue. Spears it into her cunt before dragging it back out, dragging the wet of her along with it and wrapping it around her clit, sucking at her like he’s sucking a dick, and Beth’s twitching like she’s in her death throes, grunting like she’s been wounded, like Daisy sank that knife into her belly after all. He sinks his fingers into the meat of her ass and drags her hips clear off the bed, and she was right.

When she comes, it’s like a sucker punch. When she comes, it _hurts_.

Her cunt clenches and releases, gushing come all over his face, and he has to feel it, but he doesn’t let up. She digs her heels into his spine and tries to squirm out from under him, but he claws his fingers into the bruises on her ass and holds her still, holds her against his face, slurping at her clit until one orgasm piles on top of another, and she can’t, she _can’t_ , there are tears on her face because she fucking _can’t_ —

But then he stops. He pulls off her fluttering cunt with an obscene pop and rolls his tongue over his lips, lapping her up. 

She can’t feel her legs, but she still manages to drag one off his back. Nudges her knee against his chest.

It takes her two tries before she can get her voice to work. “Lie back.”

Beth thinks he’d do anything she told him to just now, so it doesn’t surprise her when he stretches out beside her without a fight. His hands reach out for her, but she’s already lifting up onto her knees.

She straddles his leg, cunt snug against his thigh, getting spit and come all over his filthy jeans. The worn denim grates painfully at her clit, but she still grinds down against the muscle underneath of it as she bends to lick the taste of her own pussy off of his tongue. She's tasted her come before, would sometimes tuck her fingers into her mouth after she got herself off, but it never tasted as good as it does now, smeared like lipstick across Daryl Dixon’s face.

She works a hand between them, but he beats her to it, fingers fumbling with his belt and zipper. He yanks the tab down and pulls his dick out, and when Beth wraps her hand around him, she can feel that he’s wet, but not wet enough. She goes to lick her palm, but then she hesitates.

Lifting up onto her knees again, Beth tucks her hand between her legs and wets her fingers with the spit and come dripping off her pussy and tracking down her thighs, and when Daryl sees what she’s doing, he moans. Moans harder when she wraps her filthy hand around his dick and tugs back his foreskin, and she feels that moan like a slick tongue on her overworked clit.

She’s jacked guys off before—Jimmy, a couple of times, and then Zach. It always felt a little like a chore, like something to be gotten over with as quickly as possible.

It’s not like that now. Daryl wraps his hand around hers and shows her how to touch him right, how to squeeze him around the base and rub her thumb over the head, spreading precome down his shaft to smooth the way. She likes it, likes watching his eyes flutter and his mouth drop open. Likes hearing him grunt. Likes making him feel good.

She wants to make him feel even better.

Her hand stills halfway up his dick, and his eyes snap open, hips jacking into her fist once before going still. Not entirely still. Quivering, just a little, like it’s taking everything he’s got not to fuck into her hand.

She’s not trying to tease him, though she thinks she’d like to some other time. She has something she needs to ask him.

“D’you wanna—” Her voice fades out. Jesus, if she can’t even say it, she probably shouldn’t be doing it.

Daryl gets what she’s trying to say, though. He nods, frantically, then shakes his head, strands of hair sticking to his cheeks. “Don’t got no condoms.”

Beth bites her lip, then releases it. “Can’t you—can’t you just pull out?”

Daryl’s eyes go wide as marbles, either at the suggestion of fucking her or just from hearing the words ‘pull out’ on little Beth Greene’s tongue. But his dick jerks in her hand, so at least that part of him is on board.

“Ain’t safe,” he grunts, jaw strung tight, but he’s started fucking into her fist again.

She knows damn well that it isn’t safe, is the thing. Knows that this is the most fallible method of birth control there is, but she doesn’t care. She _needs_ him, needs to feel his thick dick in her cunt, and he’s—

He’s bracing his hand in the mattress and sitting up, abdominals bunching and dick smacking wetly against his belly. He grabs her thigh with his other hand and hitches it over his hip, cockhead slipping along her clit before pressing up against the open gash of her cunt. Beth tucks her face against his sweaty shoulder, toes curling so tight all the feeling goes out of them when Daryl spreads her open and sinks into her to the root.

He makes another one of those animal noises and plants an open, sloppy kiss on her shoulder. Gives her the edge of teeth. “ _Fuck_. Y’good?”

Beth doesn’t answer— _can’t_ answer, because her mouth is caught around a soundless whine. She just wraps her arms around his neck and clenches every muscle she’s got down there, squeezing him till he could pop.

He shudders all over, dick jerking inside of her like an aborted orgasm. He gropes her ass but keeps his other hand braced on the mattress for leverage, and then he fucks his hips up into hers, muscles bunching against her belly.

Beth’s teeth clip her tongue and she tastes copper, but it’s like background noise, hardly worth noticing. Everything she’s got is centered entirely on _this_ , on the smooth wet glide of his dick as it jacks in and out of her pussy and fucks all the ugly residue of the past two days right out of her.

Maybe his arm’s getting tired, or maybe he just wants to fuck her from a different angle, because he leans forward and gets his knees planted in the mattress. Beth slides off his dick and flops onto her back, and she’s hardly had time to miss him before he’s hitching her thighs around his waist and fucking back into her, and then he’s sitting back on his haunches and watching her tits bounce with every jolt of his hips.

Beth squeezes her breasts, feeling like some cornball porn star putting on a show for the cameras, but he must like it, because his hips start pistoning faster, shoving his dick as deep into her as it can get, and she releases one breast to race her hand down her abdomen and circle her clit with shaky fingers. She’s still too sensitive, and she doesn’t know if she can come again, but now his eyes are pinned to where his dick spreads her cunt open like a knife in a wound, and when she touches her clit, he grunts like it’s _his_ clit, like _he_ can feel the tingle in her nerve endings.

It’s like when they burned down that shack, when they burned his past in effigy. She isn’t just fucking him; she’s burning down who he was. She’s building up who he _is_.

Daryl stiffens, belly trembling, hips stuttering. His dick jerks inside of her, and he pulls out in a hurry, coming all over her stomach and tits. Beth watches him come, watches those thick white ropes leak out of his dick to pool across her skin. Swipes her thumb across her clit and comes, too, even though she thought she couldn’t, even though it’s more of an aftershock than a real orgasm. She drags her hand through the mess on her stomach and slurps his come off her fingers, and he says, “ _Fuck_. Jesus fuck. _Beth_ ,” like it’s been punched out of him.

His hand’s shaking when he grabs a corner of the blanket and wipes the rest of his come off her belly. He rolls her onto her side and tucks himself in behind her, his zipper’s teeth biting into her ass.   

Beth comes down gradually, pulse slowing, breath evening out. “We could stay here for a little while longer.”

Daryl shifts against her. Wraps his arm more firmly around her waist. “You wanna?”

There’s a door with a lock here. They’re as sheltered as it gets. They could stay.  

But, no. She doesn’t want to.

She rubs her sticky thighs together. The sheets are wet, not just from her orgasm, but from her still-drying hair. “Guess you could try hotwiring that car tomorrow mornin’.”

He slings one leg over both of hers. “Guess I could.”

Beth makes a wordless noise of agreement. The bandaid on her cheek is starting to itch and peel.

_Oh, my God._

She just had sex with a Mickey Mouse bandaid stuck to her face. She _seduced a guy_ with a _Mickey Mouse bandaid_ on her face, and it _still worked_. 

She turns her face into the mattress to muffle her giggle. 

She should move. Bury herself beneath the blankets before the cold touches her again. Should get up and pee, too, because neither of them were very thorough when they washed up this morning, and the last thing she needs is a UTI. God, that would be embarrassing, not to mention uncomfortable.

She drags her thumb over the pulse point in his wrist and lets her eyes drift shut. She’ll get up in a minute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do not follow Beth and Daryl’s example. This is smut, not a sex ed manual. 
> 
> I'd like to eventually write a timestamp to this from Daryl's POV, but I want to concentrate on my WIP for now. Thanks for reading along to the end. Love y'all ❤️


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